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GEORGE WASHINGTON 

(From a portrait (minted iu 1772 by C. W. Peule, now owned by General George Washington Custle Lee, 
of Lexington, Virginia) 









GEORGE WASHINGTON 



BY 



WOODROW WILSON 



ILLUSTRATED BY HOWARD PYLE 




NEW YORK AND LONDON 
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 




>__ 



; 



v^ 



Copyright, 18%, by Harper & Brothers 

All rights reserved. 



TO 

E. A W. 

"WITHOUT WHOSE SYMPATHY AND COUNSEL 

LITERARY WORK WOULD LACK 

INSPIRATION 



CONTENTS 



OHAP. PAGE 

I. In Washington's Day 3 

II. A Virginian Breeding . . t 45 

III. Colonel Washington 69 

IV. Mount Vernon Days 99 

V. The Heat of Politics ...... 117 

VI. Piloting a Revolution 153 

VII. General Washington . . 179 

VIII. The Stress of Victory 213 

IX. First in Peace 233 

X. The First President of the United States. . . . 265 

Index 315 



ILLUSTEATIOJSTS 



GEORGE WASHINGTON Frontispiece 

HEAD-PIECE. . " 3 

FACSIMILE OF THE ENTRY OF WASHINGTON'S BIRTH . . Page 41 

Washington's retreat from great meadows . . . Facing p. 70 

WASHINGTON AND MARY PHILIPSE " 92 

LEAVING MOUNT VERNON FOR THE CONGRESS OF THE 

COLONIES . , " 100 

IN THE RALEIGH TAVERN " 140 

TAIL-PIECE Page 149 

WASHINGTON AND STEUBEN AT VALLEY FORGE . . . Facing p. 200 

TAIL-PIECE Page 209 

TAIL-PIECE " 262 

THOMPSON, THE CLERK OF CONGRESS, ANNOUNCING TO 
WASHINGTON, AT MOUNT VERNON, HIS ELECTION 

TO THE PRESIDENCY Facing p. 266 

DEATH OF WASHINGTON " 304 

TAIL-PIECE Page 314 



IN WASHINGTON'S DAY 




EORGE WASHINGTON was bred a 
gentleman and a man of honor 
in the free school of Virginian 
society, with the generation that 
first learned what it meant to 
maintain English communities in 
America in safety and a self-respect- 
ing independence. He was born in 
a season of quiet peace, when the 
plot of colonial history was thickening noiselessly and 
almost without observation, lie came to his first man- 
hood upon the first stir of revolutionary events ; caught 
in their movement, he served a rough apprenticeship 



4 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

in arms at the thick of the French and Indian war; 
the Revolution found him a leader and veteran in 
affairs at forty four; every turn of fortune confirmed 
him in his executive habit of foresight and mastery ; 
death spared him, stalwart and commanding, until, 
his rising career rounded and complete, no man doubt- 
ed him the first character of his age. " Virginia gave 
us this imperial man," and with him a companion 
race of statesmen and masters in affairs. It was her 
natural gift, the times and her character being Avhat 
they were; and Washington's life showed the whole 
process of breeding by which she conceived so great a 
generosity in manliness and public spirit. 

The English colonies in America lay very tranquil in 
1732, the year in which Washington was born. It fell 
in a season betweentimes, when affairs lingered, as if 
awaiting a change. The difficulties and anxieties of 
first settlement were long ago past and done with in all 
the principal colonies. They had been hardening to 
their " wilderness work," some of them, these hundred 
years and more. England could now reckon quite six 
hundred thousand subjects upon the long Atlantic sea- 
board of the great continent which had lain remote and 
undiscovered through so many busy ages, until daring 
sailors hit upon it at last amidst the stir of the ad- 
venturous fifteenth century ; and there was no longer 
any thought that her colonists would draw back or 
falter in what they had undertaken. They had grown 
sedate even and self-poised, with somewhat of the air 
of old communities, as they extended their settlements 
upon the coasts and rivers and elaborated their means 
of self - government amidst the still forests, and each 
had already a bearing and character of its own. 'Twas 



IN WASHINGTON'S DAY 5 

easy to distinguish the New-Englander from the man 
of the southern colonies ; and the busy middle prov- 
inces that stretched back from the great bay at New 
York and from the waters of the spreading Delaware 
had also a breed of their own, like neither the men of 
the south nor the men of the northeast. Each region 
had bred for itself its characteristic communities, hold- 
ing their own distinctive standards, knowing their own 
special purposes, living their own lives with a certain 
separateness and independence. 

Virginia, the oldest of the colonies, was least to be 
distinguished by any private character of her own from 
the rural communities of England herself. Her popula- 
tion had come to her almost without selection through- 
out every stage of quick change and troubled fortune 
that England had seen during the fateful days since 
James Stuart became king; and Englishmen in Vir- 
ginia were in no way radically distinguishable from 
Englishmen in England, except that they were provin- 
cials and frontiersmen. They had their own tasks and 
ways of life, indeed, living, as they did, within the old 
forests of a virgin continent, upon the confines of the 
world. But their tastes and temperament, spite of 
change and seclusion, they had in common with Eng- 
lishmen at home. They gave leave to their opinions, 
too, with a like downright confidence and hardihood of 
belief, never doubting they knew how practical affairs 
should go. They had even kept the English character 
as they had received it, against the touch of time and 
social revolution, until Virginians seemed like elder 
Englishmen. England changed, but Virginia did not. 
There landed estates spread themselves with an ample 
acreage along the margins of the streams that every- 



q GEORGE WASHINGTON 

where threaded the virgin woodland ; and the planter 
drew about him a body of dependants who knew no 
other master; to whom came, in their seclusion, none 
of that quick air of change that had so stirred in Eng- 
land throughout all her century of revolution. Some 
were his slaves, bound to him in perpetual subjection. 
Others were his tenants, and looked upon him as a sort 
of patron. In Maryland, where similar broad estates 
lay upon every shore, the law dubbed a great property 
here and there a "manor," and suffered it to boast its 
separate court baron and private jurisdiction. Vir- 
ginian gentlemen enjoyed independence and authority 
without need of formal title. 

There was but one centre of social life in Virginia : 
at Williamsburg, the village capital, where the Govern- 
or had his " palace," where stood the colonial college, 
where there were taverns and the town houses of sun- 
dry planters of the vicinage, and where there was much 
gay company and not a little formal ceremonial in the 
season. For the rest, the Old Dominion made shift to 
do without towns. There was no great mart to which 
all the trade of the colony was drawn. Ships came and 
went upon each broad river as upon a highway, taking 
and discharging freight at the private wharves of the 
several plantations. For every planter was his own 
merchant, shipping his tobacco to England, and import- 
ing thence in return his clothes, bis tools, his house- 
hold fittings, his knowledge of the London fashions and 
of the game of politics at home. His mechanics he 
found among his own slaves and dependants. Their 
"quarters" and the offices of his simple establishment 
showed almost like a village of themselves where they 
stood in irregular groups about his own square, broad- 



IN WASHINGTON'S DAY 7 

gabled house, with its airy hall and homelike living- 
rooms. He might have good plate upon his sideboard 
and on his table, palatable old wine in his cellar, and 
on the walls about him portraits of the stately men 
and dames from whom he took his biood and breeding. 
But there was little luxury in his life. Plain comfort 
and a homely abundance sufficed him. He was a gen- 
tleman, owned all he saw around him, exercised author- 
ity, and enjoyed consideration throughout the colony ; 
but he was no prince. He lived always in the style of 
a provincial and a gentleman commoner, as his neigh- 
bors and friends did. 

Slaves, dependants, and planters, however, did not by 
any means make up the tale of Virginia's population. She 
had been peopled out of the common stock of Englishmen, 
and contained her own variety. Most of the good land 
that lay upon the lower courses of the James, the York, 
the Rappahannock, and the Potomac rivers, and upon 
the bay on either hand, had been absorbed into the es- 
tates of the wealthier planters, who began to conceive 
themselves a sort of aristocracy; but not a few plain 
men owned their own smaller tracts within the broad 
stretches of country that lay back from the rivers or 
above their navigable depth. Upon the western front 
of the colony lived sturdy frontiersmen ; and no man 
was so poor that he might not hope by thrift to hold 
his own with the best in the country. Few could own 
slaves in any number, for the negroes counted less than 
a third in a reckoning of the whole population. There 
were hired servants besides, and servants bound for a 
term of years by indenture; even criminals who could 
be had of the colony for private service ; but most men 
must needs work their own plots of ground and devise 



8 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

a domestic economy without servants. A wholesome 
democratic spirit pervaded the colony, which made even 
the greater planters hesitate to give themselves airs. 
A few families that had thriven best and longest, and 
had built up great properties for themselves, did indeed 
lay claim, as royal governors found to their great dis- 
pleasure, to a right to be heard before all others in the 
management of the government. But they could of 
course show no title but that of pride and long prac- 
tice. 'Twas only their social weight in the parish ves- 
tries, in the Council, and in the House of Burgesses that 
gave them ascendency. 

It was the same in church as in state. Virginia 
prided herself upon having maintained the Establish- 
ment without schism or sour dissent ; but she had main- 
tained it in a way all her own, with a democratic con- 
stitution and practice hardly to be found in the canons. 
Nominally the Governor had the right of presentation 
to all livings ; but the vestries took care he should sel- 
dom exercise it, and, after they had had their own way 
for a century, claimed he had lost it by prescription. 
They chose and dismissed and ruled their ministers as 
they would. And the chief planters were nowhere 
greater figures than in the vestries of their own par- 
ishes, where so many neighborhood interests were passed 
upon — the care of the poor, the survey of estates, the 
correction of disorders, the tithe rates, and the main- 
tenance of the church and minister. Sometimes the 
church building was itself the gift of the chief land- 
owner of the parish ; and the planters were always the 
chief rate-payers. Their leadership was natural and un- 
challenged. They enjoyed in their own neighborhood 
a sort of feudal pre-eminence, and the men about them 



IN WASHINGTON'S DAY 9 

easily returned in thought and estimation to that elder 
order of English life in which the chief proprietor of 
the country-side claimed as of course the homage of his 
neighbors. There were parishes, not a few, indeed, in 
which there was no such great planter to command 
consideration by a sort of social primacy. It was, after 
all, only here and there, and in the older parts of 
the colony, that affairs awaited the wish of privileged 
individuals. But it was the ascendency of the greater 
planters which most struck the imagination, and which 
gave to Virginia something of the same air and tone 
and turn of opinion that existed in England, with its 
veritable aristocracy, its lordly country gentlemen, its 
ancient distinctions of class and manners. 

Those who took counsel in England concerning colo- 
nial affairs had constant occasion to mark the sharp 
contrast between the easy-going Virginians, who were 
no harder to govern than Englishmen everywhere, and 
the men of the northeastern colonies, with their dry 
reserve and their steadfast resolution not to be gov- 
erned at all. These seemed unlike Englishmen else- 
where ; a whit stiffer, shrewder, more self-contained 
and circumspect. They were, in fact, a peculiar people. 
Into New England had come a selected class, picked 
out of the general mass of Englishmen at home by test 
of creed. " God sifted the whole nation," one of their 
own preachers had told them, at election-time, in the 
far year 1668, " that he might send choice grain out 
into this wilderness." But the variety of the old life 
in England had been lost in the sifting. The Puritan, 
for all he was so strong and great a figure in his day, 
was but one man among a score in the quick and vari- 
ous English life. His single standard and manner of 



10 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

living, out of the many that strove for mastery in the 
old seats where the race was bred, had been transferred 
to New England ; and he had had separate and undis- 
puted ascendency there to build new commonwealths 
as he would. The Puritan Commonwealth in England 
had been the government of a minority. Cromwell had 
done his work of chastening with a might and fervor 
which he found, not in the nation, but in himself and in 
the stout men-at-arms and hardy reformers who stood 
with him while he purified England and brought upon 
all her foes a day of reckoning. The people had stood 
cowed and uneasy while he lived, and had broken into 
wild excess of joy at their release when he died. But 
in New England an entire community consented to the 
Puritan code and mastery with a hearty acquiescence. 
It was for this liberty. they had come over sea. 

And the thoughtful, strong-willed men who were their 
leaders had built, as they wished, a polity that should 
last. Time wrought its deep changes in New England, 
as elsewhere, but the stamp set upon these Puritan set- 
tlements by the generation that founded them was not 
effaced. Trade made its characteristic mark upon them. 
Their merchants had presently their own fleets and 
markets. Their hardy people took more and more to 
the sea, lived the rough life of the ocean ways with a 
relish, beat in their small craft up and down the whole 
coast of the continent, drove bargains everywhere, and 
everywhere added a touch to their reputation as doughty 
sea-dogs and shrewd traders. The population that after 
a while came to New England did not stay to be sifted 
before attempting the voyage out of the Old World, 
and the quaint sedateness of the settlements began to 
be broken by a novel variety. New men beset the old 



IN WASHINGTON'S DAY H 

order; a rough democracy began to make itself felt; 
and new elements waxed bold amidst the new condi- 
tions that time had wrought. The authority of the 
crown at last made a place of command for itself, de- 
spite every stubborn protest and astute evasion. It be- 
came necessary to be a trifle less observant of sect and 
creed, to cultivate, as far as might be, a temper of tol- 
erance and moderation. But it was a slow change at 
best. The old order might be modified, but it could not 
so soon be broken. New England, through all her ju- 
risdictions, remained a body of churches, as well as a 
body of towns, submissive to the doctrine and discipline 
of her learned clergy, keeping the old traditions dis- 
tinct, indubitable, alike in her schools and her meeting- 
houses. Even in Rhode Island, where there had from 
the first been such diversity of creed and license of in- 
dividual belief, there was little variety of type among 
the people, for all they counted themselves so free to 
be what they would. There was here a singular as- 
sortment, no doubt, of the units of the stock, but it 
was of the Puritan stuff, none the less, through all its 
variety. 

New England, indeed, easily kept her character, for 
she lived apart. Her people mustered a full hundred 
thousand strong before the seventeenth century was 
out ; her towns numbered many score, both upon the 
margins of the sea and within the forests ; but she still 
lay within a very near frontier, pushed back only a 
short journey from the coast. Except where the towns 
of Connecticut ran in broken line close to the westward 
strait of Long Island Sound, a broad wilderness of un- 
touched woodland, of thicketed hills and valleys that 
no white man yet had seen, stretched between them 



12 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

and Hudson's river, where New York's settlements lay 
upon the edge of a vast domain, reaching all the way 
to the great lakes and the western rivers. Not till 1725 
did adventurous settlers dare go so far as the Berk- 
shire Hills. "Our country," exclaimed Colonel Byrd, 
of Virginia, who had seen its wild interior, "has now 
been inhabited more than a hundred and thirty years, 
and still we hardly know anything of the Appalachian 
Mountains, which are nowhere above two hundred and 
fifty miles from the sea." A full century after the 
coming of the Pilgrims, New England, like Virginia, 
was still a frontier region, shut close about on every 
hand by thick forests beset by prowling bands of sav- 
ages. She had as yet no intimate contact with the other 
colonies whose fortunes she was to share. Her simple 
life, quickened by adventure, but lacking the full pulse 
of old communities, kept, spite of slow change, to a 
single standard of conduct, made her one community 
from end to end, her people one people. She stood 
apart and compact, still soberly cultivating, as of old, a 
life and character all her own. Colonel Byrd noted 
how " New England improved much faster than Vir- 
ginia," and was fain to think that " though these peo- 
ple may be ridiculed for some Pharisaical particularities 
in their worship and behavior, yet they were very use- 
ful subjects, as being frugal and industrious, giving no 
scandal or bad example." Public men in England, who 
had to face these " particularities in behavior," would 
hardly have agreed that the men of New England were 
good subjects, though they must have admitted their 
excellent example in thrift, and Virginia's need to im- 
itate it. 

This contrast between the northern and southern set 



IN WASHINGTON'S DAT 13 

tlements was as old as their establishment, for Virginia 
had from the first been resorted to by those who had 
no other purpose than to better their fortunes, while 
New England had been founded to be the home of a 
creed and discipline; but it was not until the Common- 
wealth was set up in England that the difference began 
to be marked, and to give promise of becoming per- 
manent. The English in Virginia, like the bulk of their 
countrymen at home, had stood aghast at a king's death 
upon the scaffold, and had spoken very hotly, in their 
loyalty, of the men who had dared do the impious deed 
of treason ; but when the Guinea, frigate, brought the 
Commonwealth's commission into the river to demand 
their submission, even Sir William Berkeley, the re- 
doubtable Cavalier Governor, who had meant stub- 
bornly to keep his province for the second Charles, saw 
he must yield ; perceived there was too nice a balance 
of parties in the colony to permit an execution of his 
plans of resistance ; heard too many plain men in his 
Council, and out of it, declare themselves very much of 
a mind with the Puritans for the nonce in politics — 
very willing to set up a democracy in Virginia which 
should call itself a part of the Puritan state in Eng- 
land. But a great change had been wrought in Vir- 
ginia while the Commonwealth lasted. When the Com- 
monwealth's frigate came in at the capes she counted 
scarcely fifteen thousand settlers upon her plantations, 
but the next twenty years saw her transformed. By 
1670 quite twenty-five thousand people were added to 
the reckoning ; and of the new-comers a great multi- 
tude had left England as much because they hated the 
Puritans as because they desired Virginia. They were 
drawn out of that great majority at home to whom 



14 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

Cromwell had not dared resort to get a new parlia- 
ment in the stead of the one he had " purged." Many 
of them were of the hottest blood of the Cavaliers. 

It was in these years Virginia got her character and 
received her leading gentry for the time to come — the 
years while the Commonwealth stood and royalists de- 
spaired, and the years immediately following the Ees- 
toration, when royalists took heart again and English- 
men turned with a new ardor to colonization as the 
times changed. Among the rest in the great migration 
came two brothers, John and Lawrence Washington, 
of a stock whose loyalty was as old as the Conquest. 
They came of a Norman family, the men of whose 
elder branch had for two hundred years helped the 
stout Bishops of Durham keep the border against the 
Scots ; and in every branch of which men had sprung 
up to serve the king, the state, and the church with 
steadfastness and honor: dashing soldiers ready for the 
field at home or abroad, stout polemical priors, lawyers 
who knew the learning of their day and made their 
way to high posts in chancery, thrifty burghers, gallant 
courtiers, prosperous merchants — public-spirited gentle- 
men all. It was Colonel Henry Washington, cousin 
to the Virginian refugees, who had been with Eupert 
when he stormed Bristol, and who, with a handful of 
men, had made good an entrance into the town when 
all others were beaten back and baffled. It was he 
who had held Worcester for his master even after he 
knew Charles to be a prisoner in the hands of the par- 
liamentary forces. "Procure his Majesty's commands 
for the disposal of this garrison," was all he would an- 
swer when Fairfax summoned him to surrender; "till 
then I shall make good the trust reposed in me. The 



IN WASHINGTON'S DAY 15 

worst I know and fear not ; if I had, the profession of 
a soldier had not been began." But it was an ill time 
to revive the traditions of the knights of Durham; 
loyalty only brought ruin. The Reverend Lawrence 
Washington, uncle to the gallant colonel who was the 
King's Governor at Worcester, had been cast out of his 
living at Purleigh in 1643 by order of Parliament, upon 
the false charge that he was a public tippler, oft drunk, 
and loud to rail against the Parliament and its armies ; 
but really because, with all his race, he was a royalist, 
and his living one of the best in Essex. It was his 
sons who left off hoping to see things mend in England 
and betook themselves to Virginia. His ruin had come 
upon him while they were yet lads. He had been a 
brilliant university scholar, fellow and lector of Brase- 
nose, and rector of Oxford ; but he could give his sons 
neither a university career nor hope of fortune in the 
humble parish pitying friends had found for him in an 
obscure village of Essex ; and when he was dead they 
saw no reason why they should stay longer in Eng- 
land, where Cromwell was master. 

John Washington, the oldest son of the unfortunate 
rector, reached Virginia in 1656, having made his way 
to the colony as " second man " to Edward Prescott, 
merchant and ship-owner, in whose company he had 
come ; and his brother Lawrence, after passing to and 
fro between England and the colony several times 
upon errands of business, presently joined him in per- 
manent residence upon the " northern neck " of rich 
land that lay between the Rappahannock and the Po- 
tomac rivers. It was a region where every settlement 
as yet was new. A few families had fixed themselves 
upon it when Maryland drove Captain Clayborne and 



1G GEORGE WASHINGTON 

his Virginian partisans forth from Kent Island in the 
years 1637 and 1038; and they had mustered numbers 
enough within a few years to send a representative to 
the House of Burgesses at Jamestown. But it was not 
till 1648 that the Assembly gave their lands a regular 
constitution as the County of Northumberland ; for it 
was to this region the Indians had been driven by the 
encroachment of the settlements on the James and 
York, and for a while the Assembly had covenanted 
with the red men to keep it free from settlers. When 
once the ban was removed, however, in 1618, coloniza- 
tion set in apace — from the older counties of Virginia, 
from Maryland across the river and England over sea, 
from New England even, as if by a common impulse. 
In 1651 the Assembly found it necessary to create the 
two additional counties of Gloucester and Lancaster, 
and in 1653 still another, the County of Westnn > re- 
land, for the region's proper government, so quickly 
did it fill in ; for the tide out of England already be- 
gan to show its volume. The region was a natural sent 
of commerce, and merchants out of the trading ports of 
England particularly affected it. Kich land was abun- 
dant, and the Potomac ran strong and ample there, to 
carry the commerce alike of Virginia amLMaryland to 
the bay, upon whose tributaries and inlets lay all the 
older settlements of both colonies. Lawrence Wash- 
ington, though he still described himself, upon occa- 
sion, as " of Luton, County Bedford, merchant," found 
his chief profit where he made his home, with his 
brother John, in the new County of Westmoreland in 
Virginia. About them lived young men and old, come, 
like themselves, out of England, or drawn from the 
older settlements by the attractions of the goodly re- 



IN WASHINGTON'S DAY 17 

gion, looking out, as it did, on either hand to a broad 
river and an easy trade. They felt it scarcely an ex- 
patriation to live there, so constantly did ships come 
and go between their wharves and the home ports at 
Bristol and London. It soon grew to be nothing sin- 
gular to see well-to-do men go every year to England 
upon some errand of profit or pleasure. 

It was with such a region and such stirring neigh- 
bors that the young Washingtons identified themselves 
while they were yet youths in their twenties; and there 
they prospered shrewdly with the rest. Prudent men 
and men of character readily accumulated estates in 
the untouched glades and forests of Westmoreland. 
The season of their coming, moreover, sadly as things 
seemed to go in 1656, turned out propitious. The Kes- 
toration opened a new era in the settlement of the 
country. Englishmen bestirred themselves to take act- 
ual possession of all the great coast -line they had so 
long claimed without occupying. "The Dutch had 
enjoyed New Netherland during the distractions of the 
reign of Charles I. without any other interruption" 
than the seizure of their post upon the Connecticut 
by the New-Englanders, and the aggressions alike of 
Swedes and English upon the Delaware ; but the min- 
isters of Charles II., though " for some time perplexed 
in what light to view them, whether as subjects or as 
aliens, determined at length that New Netherland ought 
in justice to be resumed," and the thing was presently 
accomplished in true sovereign fashion by force of 
arms. To the ducal province of New York, Penn 
presently added the thrifty Quaker colony which so 
promptly created a busy town and mart of trade at 
Philadelphia, and which pushed its rural settlements 



18 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

back so speedily into the fertile lands that lay towards 
the west. Then, while the new colonizing impulse still 
ran strong, New Jersey, too, was added, with her limits 
at one end upon the Hudson and the great bay at New 
York, where she depended upon one rival for a port of 
entry, and at the other upon the Delaware, where an- 
other rival presided over the trade of her southern 
highway to the sea. To the southward straggling set- 
tlements upon Albemarle Sound grew slowly into the 
colony of North Carolina ; and still other settlements, 
upon the rivers that lay towards Florida, throve so 
bravely that Charleston presently boasted itself a sub- 
stantial town, and South Carolina had risen to be a 
considerable colony, prosperous, well ordered, and show- 
ing a quick life and individuality of her own. 

A new migration had come out of England to the 
colonies, and Englishmen looked with fresh confidence 
to see their countrymen build an empire in America. 
And yet perhaps not an empire of pure English blood. 
New York was for long scarcely the less a Dutch prov- 
ince, for all she had changed owners, and saw English- 
men crowd in to control her trade. There were Swedes 
still upon the Delaware; and Pennsylvania mustered 
among her colonists, besides a strange mixture out of 
many nations — Germans, French, Dutch, Finns, and 
English. Even in Virginia, which so steadily kept its 
English character, there were to be found groups of 
French Huguenots and Germans who had been given 
an ungrudging welcome ; and South Carolina, though 
strongly English too, had taken some of her best blood 
out of France when Louis so generously gave the world 
fifty thousand families of the finest breed of his king- 
dom by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). 



IN WASHINGTON'S DAY 19 

The second quarter of the eighteenth century saw 
Scots-Irish enter Virginia and the middle colonies in 
hosts that for a time numbered ten thousand by the 
year. Pennsylvania alone, in the single year 1729, 
could reckon five thousand of these sturdy people who 
had come to multiply and strengthen her settlements. 

It was to the middle colonies that most foreigners 
came, and their coming gave to the towns and farms 
of that region a variety of tongues and customs, of 
manners and trades and ways of life and worship, to 
be found nowhere else. Boston, with all its trade and 
seafaring, had no touch of that cosmopolitan character 
which New York had taken on quite inevitably in the 
course of her varying fortunes, and which Philadelphia 
had assumed by choice; and rural Virginia scarcely 
felt amidst her scattered plantations the presence of the 
few families who lived by standards that were not Eng- 
lish. The common feature of the new time, with its 
novel enterprises and its general immigration, was that 
the colonies everywhere, whether young or old, felt a 
keen stimulation and a new interest in affairs beyond 
their borders. A partial exchange of population be- 
gan, a noticeable intercolonial migration. Whole con- 
gregations came out of New England to found towns 
in New Jersey, and individuals out of every colony vent- 
ured more freely than before to exchange one region 
for another, in order to coax health or fortune. Pop- 
ulation was thus not a little compacted, while the colo- 
nies were drawn by insensible degrees to feel a certain 
community of interest and cultivate a certain commu- 
nity of opinion. 

An expanding life, widened fields of enterprise and 
adventure, quickened hopes, and the fair prospects of a 



20 GEORGE WASHINGTON 



growing empire everywhere heartened strong men in 
the colonies to steady endeavor when the new century 
opened — the scheming, calculating eighteenth century, 
so unimpassioned and conventional at first, so tempest- 
uous at last. The men of the colonies were not so 
new as their continent in the ways of civilization. They 
were Old World men put upon fresh coasts and a forest 
frontier, to make the most of them, create markets, 
build a new trade, become masters of vast resources as 
yet untouched and incalculable ; and they did their work 
for the most part with unmatched spirit and energy, 
notwithstanding they were checked and hampered by 
the statutes of the realm. The Navigation Acts forbade 
the use of any but English ships in trade ; forbade all 
trade, besides, which did not run direct to and from the 
ports of England. The colonies must not pass England 
by even in their trade with one another. What they 
could not produce themselves they must bring straight 
from England ; what they had to dispose of they must 
send straight to England. If they would exchange 
among themselves they must make England by the way, 
so that English merchants should be their middlemen 
and factors ; or else, if they must needs carry direct 
from port to port of their own coasts, they must pay 
such duties as they would have paid in English ports 
had they actually gone the intermediate voyage to Eng- 
land preferred by the statutes. 'Twas the " usage of 
other nations" besides England "to keep their planta- 
tion trade to themselves" in that day, as the Parliament 
itself said and no man could deny, and 'twas the purpose 
of such restrictions to maintain "a greater correspond- 
ence and kindness between " England and her subjects 
in America, "keeping them in a firmer dependence," 






IN WASHINGTON'S DAY 21 

and at the same time " rendering them yet more bene- 
ficial and advantageous " to English seamen, merchants, 
wool-growers, and manufacturers ; but it cost the colo- 
nists pride and convenience and profit to obey. 

Some, who felt the harness of such law too smartly, 
consoled themselves by inventing means to escape it. 
The coast was long; was opened by many an unused 
harbor, great and small ; could not everywhere and al- 
ways be watched by king's officers; was frequented by a 
tolerant people, who had no very nice conscience about 
withholding taxes from a sovereign whose messages and 
commands came quickly over sea only when the wind held 
fair for weeks together ; and cargoes could be got both 
out and in at small expense of secrecy and no expense at 
all in duties. In short, smuggling was easy. 'Twas a 
time of frequent wars, moreover, and privateering com- 
missions were to be had for the asking ; so that French 
ships could be brought in with their lading, condemned, 
and handsomely sold, without the trouble of paying 
French prices or English port clues. Privateering, too, 
was cousin-german to something still better; 'twas but 
a sort of formal apprenticeship to piracy ; and the quiet, 
unused harbors of the coast showed many a place where 
the regular profession might be set up. Veritable pirates 
took the sea, hunted down what commerce they would 
— English no less than French and Dutch and Spanish 
— rendezvoused in lonely sounds, inlets, and rivers where 
king's officers never came, and kept very respectable 
company when they came at last to dispose of their 
plunder at New York or Charleston, being men very 
learned in subterfuges and very quick-fingered at brib- 
ing. And then there was " the Ked Sea trade," whose 
merchants sent fleets to Madagascar in the season to ex- 



oo GEORGE WASHINGTON 

change cargoes with rough men out of the Eastern seas, 
of whom they courteously asked no questions. The 
larger ports were full of sailors who waited to be en- 
gaged, not at regular wages, but " on the grand ac- 
count " ; and it took many weary years of hangman's 
labor to bring enough pirates to the gallows to scotch 
the ugly business. In 1717 it was reported in the colo- 
nies that there were quite fifteen hundred pirates on the 
coast, full one-half of whom made their headquarters, 
very brazenly, at New Providence in the Bahamas ; and 
there were merchants and mariners by the score who 
had pangs of keen regret to see the breezy trade go 
down, as the century drew on a decade or two, because 
of the steady vigilance and stern endeavor of Governors 
who had been straitly commanded to suppress it. • 

The Navigation Acts bred an irritation in the colonies 
which grew with their growth and strengthened with 
their consciousness of strength and capacity. Not be- 
cause such restrictions were uncommon, but because the 
colonies were forward and exacting. There was, indeed, 
much to commend the legislation they resented. It at- 
tracted the capital of English, merchants to the American 
trade, it went far towards securing English supremacy 
on the seas, and it was strictly within the powers of 
Parliament, as no man could deny. Parliament had an 
undoubted right to regulate imperial interests, of this or 
any other kind, even though it regulated them unreason- 
ably. But colonies that reckoned their English popula- 
tion by the hundred thousand and lived by trade and 
adventure would not long have brooked such a policy of 
restraint had they had the leisure to fret over it. They 
did not as yet have the leisure. The French stood men- 
acingly at their western gates, through which the great 



IN WASHINGTON'S DAY 23 

fur trade made its way ; where the long rivers ran which 
threaded the central valleys of the continent ; where the 
Mississippi stretched itself from north to south like a 
great body of dividing waters, flanking all the coast and 
its settlements — where alone a true mastery of the con- 
tinent and its resources could be held. It would be 
time enough to reckon with Parliament touching the 
carrying trade when they had made good their title to 
what they were to trade withal. 

The French had been a long time about their work, 
for they had done it like subjects, at the bidding of 
an ambitious king, rather than like free men striving 
as they pleased for themselves. But what they had 
done they had done systematically and with a fixed 
policy that did not vary, though ministers and even 
dynasties might come and go. The English had 
crowded to the coasts of the continent as they pleased, 
and had mustered their tens of thousands before the 
French reckoned more than a few hundreds. But the 
French had hit upon the mighty river St. Lawrence, 
whose waters came out of the great lakes and the heart 
of the continent ; their posts were garrisons ; what men 
they had they put forward, at each step of discovery, at 
some point of vantage upon lake or river, whence they 
were not easily dislodged. Their shrewd fur-traders and 
dauntless priests struck everywhere into the heart of 
the forests, leading forward both trade and conquest, 
until at last, through the country of the Illinois and 
out of far Lake Michigan, the streams had been found 
which ran down into the west to the flooding Missis- 
sippi. Colonists were sent to the mouth of the vast 
river, posts presently dotted its banks here and there 
throughout its length, trade passed up and down its 



24 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

spreading stream, and the English, their eyes at last 
caught by the stealthy movement, looked in a short 
space to see French settlements " running all along from 
our lakes by the back of Virginia and Carolina to the 
Bay of Mexico." 

This was a business that touched the colonies to the 
quick. New York had her western frontiers upon the 
nearer lakes. Thence, time out of mind, had come the 
best furs to the markets at Albany, brought from tribe 
to tribe out of the farthest regions of the northwest. 
New England, with the French at her very doors, had 
to look constantly to her northern borders to keep them 
against the unquiet savage tribes the French every year 
stirred up against her. Virginia felt the French power 
among her savage neighbors too, the moment her peo- 
ple ventured across the Blue Kidge into the valley 
where many an ancient war-path ran ; and beyond the 
Alleghanies she perceived she must stand in the very 
presence almost of the French themselves. English fron- 
tiersmen and traders, though they had no advancing 
military posts behind them, were none the less quick to 
go themselves deep into the shadowed wilderness, there 
to meet the French face to face in their own haunts. 
The Carolinas were hardly settled before their more ad- 
venturous spirits went straight into the far valley of the 
Tennessee, and made trade for themselves there against 
the coming of the French. Out of Virginia, too, and 
out of Pennsylvania, as well as out of New York, traders 
pressed towards the West, and fixed their lonely huts 
here and there along the wild banks of the Ohio. 'Twas 
diamond cut diamond when they met their French rivals 
in the wigwams of the Indian villages, and their canoes 
knew the waterways of the wilderness as well as any 



IN WASHINGTON'S DAY 25 

man's. 'Twas they who learned at first hand what the 
French were doing. They were like scouts sent out to 
view the ground to be fought for. 

This hazardous meeting of rival nations at the heart 
of the continent meant many a deep change in the fort- 
unes of the colonies. European politics straightway en- 
tered their counsels. Here was an end of their sepa- 
rateness and independence of England. Charles and 
James and William all showed that they meant to be 
veritable sovereigns, and had no thought but that the 
colonists in America, like all other Englishmen, should 
be their subjects ; and here was their opportunity to be 
masters upon an imperial scale and with an imperial ex- 
cuse. In Europe, England beheld France her most for- 
midable foe ; she must look to it that Louis and his min- 
isters take no advantage in America. The colonies, no 
less than the Channel itself, were become the frontiers 
of an empire — and there must be no trespass upon Eng- 
lish soil by the French. The colonists must be rallied 
to the common work, and, if used, they must be ruled 
and consolidated. 

As it turned out, the thing was quite impossible. 
The colonies had too long been separate ; their charac- 
ters, their tempers, their interests, were too diverse and 
distinct ; they were unused to co-operate, and unwilling ; 
they were too slow to learn submission in anything. 
The plan of grouping several of them under a single 
governor was attempted, but they remained as separate 
under that arrangement as under any other. Massachu- 
setts would interest herself in nothing beyond her own 
jurisdiction that did not immediately touch her safety 
or advantage; New York cared little what the French 
did, if only the Iroquois could be kept quiet and she 



26 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

could get her furs in the season, and find a market for 
them abroad or among the French themselves ; Virginia 
had no eye for any movement upon the frontiers that 
did not menace her own fair valleys within the moun- 
tains with hostile occupation; the Carolinas were as yet 
too young to be serviceable, and New Jersey too remote 
from points of danger. Nowhere could either men or 
supplies be had for use against the French except by the 
vote of a colonial assembly. The law of the empire 
might be what it would in the mouths of English 
judges at home ; it did not alter the practice of the col- 
onies. The courts in England might say with what 
emphasis they liked that Virginia, " being a conquered 
country, their law is what the King pleases " ; it was 
none the less necessary for the King's Governor to 
keep on terms with the people's representatives. " Our 
government is so happily constituted," writes Colonel 
Byrd to his friend in the Barbadoes, " that a governor 
must first outwit us before he can oppress us. And if 
ever he squeeze money out of us, he must first take care 
to deserve it." Every colony held stoutly to a like 
practice, with a like stubborn temper, which it was mere 
folly to ignore. One and all they were even then " too 
proud to submit, too strong to be forced, too enlightened 
not to see all the consequences which must arise" should 
they tamely consent tc be rulea by royal command or 
parliamentary enactment. Their obedience must be had 
on their own terms, or else not had at all. Governors 
saw this plainly enough, though the ministers at home 
could not. Many a governor had his temper sadly 
soured by the contentious obstinacy of the colonial as- 
sembly he was set to deal with. One or two died of sheer 
exasperation. But the situation was not altered a whit. 



IN WASHINGTON'S DAY 27 

When there is friction there must, sooner or later be 
adjustment, if affairs are to go forward at all, and this 
contest between imperial system and colonial indepen- 
dence at last brought some things that had been vague 
to a very clear definition. 'Twas plain the colonies 
would not of themselves combine to meet and oust the 
French. They would supply neither men nor money, 
moreover. England must send her own armies to Amer- 
ica, fight France there as she would have fought her in 
Europe, and pay the reckoning herself out of her own 
treasurjf, getting from the colonies, the while, only such 
wayward and niggardly aid as they chose to give. The 
colonies, meanwhile, might gather some of the fruits of 
experience; might learn how safe it was to be selfish, 
and how unsafe, if they hoped to prosper and be free ; 
might perceive where their common interests lay, and 
their common power; might in some degree steady 
their lives and define their policy against the coming of 
more peaceful times. Two wars came and went which 
brought France and England to arms against each 
other in America, as in Europe, but they passed away 
without decisive incident in the New World, and there 
followed upon them thirty years of uneventful peace, 
during which affairs hung at a nice balance, and the 
colonies took counsel, each for itself, how they should 
prosper. 

Virginia, meanwhile, had got the charter she was to 
keep. From the Potomac to the uncertain border of 
the Carolinas she had seen her counties fill with the 
men who were to decide her destiny. Her people, close 
upon a hundred thousand strong, had fallen into the or- 
der of life they were to maintain. They were no longer 
colonists merely, but citizens of a commonwealth of 



28 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

which they began to be very proud, not least because 
they saw a noble breed of public men spring out of 
their own loins to lead them. Though they were scat- 
tered, they were not divided. There was, after all, no 
real isolation for any man in Virginia, for all that he 
lived so much apart and was a sort of lord within his 
rustic barony. In that sunny land men were constantly 
abroad, looking to their tobacco and the labor of all 
kinds that must go forward, but would not unless they 
looked to it, or else for the sheer pleasure of bestriding 
a good horse, being quit of the house, and breathing 
free in the genial air. Bridle-paths everywhere threaded 
the forests; it was no great matter to ride from house 
to house among one's neighbors; there were county- 
court days, moreover, to draw the country-side together, 
whether there was much business or little to be seen to. 
Men did not thrive thereabouts by staying within doors, 
but by being much about, knowing their neighbors, ob- 
serving what ships came and went upon the rivers, and 
what prices were got for the cargoes they carried away ; 
learning what the news was from Williamsburg and 
London, what horses and cattle were to be had, and 
what dogs, of what breeds. It was a country in which 
news and opinions and friendships passed freely current; 
where men knew each other with a rare leisurely in- 
timacy, and enjoyed their easy, unforced intercourse 
with a keen and lasting relish. 

It was a country in which men kept their individuali- 
ty very handsomely withal. If there was no town life, 
there were no town manners either, no village conven- 
tionalities to make all men of one carriage and pattern 
and manner of living. Every head of a family was 
head also of an establishment, and could live with a self- 



IN WASHINGTON'S DAY 29 

respect and freedom which were subject to no man's 
private scrutiny. He had leave, in his independence, to 
be himself quite naturally, and did not need to justify 
his liberty by excuses. And yet he had responsibilities 
too, and a position which steadied and righted him al- 
most in spite of himself. It required executive capacity 
to make his estate pay, and an upright way of life to 
maintain his standing. If he was sometimes loud and 
hectoring, or over-careless what he said or did, 'twas 
commonly because he was young or but half come into 
his senses; for his very business, of getting good crops 
of tobacco and keeping on dealing terms with his neigh- 
bors, demanded prudence and a conduct touched with 
consideration. He had to build his character very care- 
fully by the plumb to keep it at an equilibrium, though 
he might decorate it, if it were but upright, as freely, 
as whimsically even, as he chose, with chance traits and 
self-pleasing tastes, with the full consent and tolerance 
of the neighborhood. He was his own man, might have 
his own opinions if he held them but courteously 
enough, might live his own life if he but lived it cleanly 
and without offence. 'Twas by their living rather than 
by their creed or their livelihood that men were assessed 
and esteemed. 

It was not a life that bred students, though it was a 
life that begot thoughtfulness and leadership in affairs. 
Those who fell in the way of getting them had not a 
few books upon their shelves, because they thought every 
gentleman should have such means of knowing what 
the world had said and done before his day. But they 
read only upon occasion, when the weather darkened, 
or long evenings dragged because there were no guests 
in the house. Not much systematic education was pos- 



30 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

sible where the population was so dispersed and sepa- 
rate. A few country schools undertook what was ab- 
solutely necessary, and gave instruction in such practi 
cal branches as every man must know something of who 
was to take part in the management of private and pub- 
lic business. For the rest, those who chose could get 
the languages from private tutors, when they were to 
be had, and then go over sea to read at the universities, 
or to Williamsburg when at last the colony had its own 
college of William and Mary. More youths went from 
the Northern Neck to England for their education, no 
doubt, than from any other part of Virginia. The 
counties there were somewhat closer than the rest to 
the sea, bred more merchants and travellers, kept up a 
more intimate correspondence both by travel and by 
letter with Bristol and London and all the old English 
homes. And even those who stayed in Virginia had most 
of them the tradition of refinement, spoke the mother 
tongue purely and with a proper relish, and maintained 
themselves somehow, with perhaps an added touch of 
simplicity that was their own, in the practices of a cul- 
tivated race. 

No one in Virginia thought that " becoming a mere 
scholar" was "a desirable education for a gentleman." 
He ought to "become acquainted with men and things 
rather than books." Books must serve only to deepen 
and widen the knowledge he should get by observation 
and a free intercourse with those about him. When 
Virginians wrote, therefore, you might look to find them 
using, not studied phrases, but a style that smacked 
fresh of all the free elements of good talk — not like 
scholars or professed students, but like gentlemen of 
leisure and cultivated men of affairs — with a subtle, not 



IN WASHINGTON'S DAY 31 

unpleasing flavor of egotism, and the racy directness of 
speech, withal, that men may use who are sure of their 
position. Such was the writing of Robert Beverley, 
whose History and Present State of Virginia, published 
in London in 1705, spoke at first hand and authorita- 
tively of affairs of which the world had heard hitherto 
only by uncertain report. He did not write the manly 
book because he had a pricking ambition to be an au- 
thor, but because he loved Virginia, and wished to give 
such an account of her affairs as would justify his pride 
in her. He came of an ancient English family, whose 
ample means were scarcely more considerable in Virginia 
than they had been in Beverley, in Yorkshire. He had 
himself been carefully educated in England, and had 
learned to feel very much at home there ; but the at- 
tractions of the old home did not wean him from his 
love of the new, where he had been born — that quiet 
land where men dealt with one another so frankly, 
where Nature was so genial in all her moods, and men 
so without pretence. Official occupations gave him oc- 
casion while yet a very young man to handle familiar- 
ly the records of the colony, the intimate letters of its 
daily life, and he took a proud man's pleasure in ex- 
tracting from them, and from the traditions of those 
who still carried much of the simple history in their 
own recollections of a stirring life, a frank and genial 
story of what had been done and seen in Virginia. 
And so his book became " the living testimony of a 
proud and generous Virginian " — too proud to conceal 
his opinions or withhold censure where it was merited, 
too generous not to set down very handsomely whatever 
was admirable and of good report in the life of his peo- 
ple. His own manly character, speaking out every- 



32 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

where, as it does, in lively phrase and candid meaning, 
is itself evidence of the wholesome native air he so 
praises in Virginia. 

He thought himself justified in loving a country 
where "plantations, orchards, and gardens constantly 
afford fragrant and delightful walks. In their woods 
and fields they have an unknown variety of vegetables 
and other rarities of nature to discover and observe. 
They have hunting, fishing, and fowling, with which 
they entertain themselves in a thousand ways. Here is 
the most good nature and hospitality practised in the 
world, both towards friends and strangers ; but the 
worst of it is this generosity is attended now and then 
with a little too much intemperance. The neighborhood 
is at much the same distance as in the country in Eng- 
land, but with this advantage, that all the better sort of 
people have been abroad and seen the world, by which 
means they are free from that stiffness and formality 
which discover more civility than kindness. And be- 
sides, the goodness of the roads and the fairness of the 
weather bring people oftener together." 

Of a like quality of genuineness and good breeding is 
the writing of Colonel William Byrd, the accomplished 
master of Westover, who was of the same generation. 
He may well have been the liveliest man in Virginia, so 
piquant and irrepressible is the humor that runs through 
almost every sentence he ever wrote. It must be he 
wrote for pastime. He never took the pains to publish 
anything. His manuscripts lay buried a hundred years 
or more in the decent sepulture of private possession ere 
they were printed, but were even then as quick as when 
they were written. Beverley had often a grave smile 
for what he recorded, or a quiet sarcasm of tone in the 



IN WASHINGTON'S DAT 33 

telling of it. " The militia are the only standing forces 
in Virginia," he says, very demurely, and " they are 
happy in the enjoyment of an everlasting peace.' 1 But 
Colonel Byrd is very merry, like a man of sense, not 
contriving the jest, but only letting it slip, revealing it; 
looks very shrewdly into things, and very wisely, too, 
but with an easy eye, a disengaged conscience, keeping 
tally of the score like one who attends but is not too 
deeply concerned. He was, in fact, very deeply en- 
gaged in all affairs of importance — no man more deeply 
or earnestly ; but when he wrote 'twas not his chief 
business to speak of that. He was too much of a gen- 
tleman and too much of a wit to make grave boast of 
what he was doing. 

No man born in Virginia had a greater property than 
he, a house more luxuriously appointed, or a part to 
play more princely ; and no man knew the value of 
position and wealth and social consideration more ap- 
preciatively. His breeding had greatly quickened his 
perception of such things. He had had a long training 
abroad, had kept very noble company alike in England 
and on the Continent, had been called to the bar in the 
Middle Temple and chosen a Fellow of the Royal 
Society, and so had won his freedom of the world of 
letters and of affairs. Yet he had returned to Virginia, 
as all her sons did, with only an added zest to serve and 
enjoy her. Many designs for her development throve 
because of his interest and encouragement; he sought 
her advantage jealously in her Council, as her agent in 
England, as owner of great tracts of her fertile lands. 
'Twas he who brought to her shores some of her best 
settlers, gave her promise of veritable towns at Rich- 
mond and Petersburg, fought arbitrary power wherever 

3 



34 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

it showed itself in her government, and proved himself 
in every way " a true and worthy inheritor of the feel- 
ings and opinions of the old cavaliers of Virginia." But 
through all his busy life he carried himself like the 
handsome, fortunate man he was, with a touch of gayety, 
a gallant spirit of comradeship, a zest for good books, 
spirited men, and comely women — heartily, like a man 
who, along with honor, sought the right pleasures of 
the world. 

Nothing daunted the spirits of this manly gentleman, 
not even rough work at the depths of the forest, upon 
the public business of determining the southern boun- 
dary-line of the colony, or upon the private business of 
seeing to his own distant properties in North Carolina. 
It gave him only the better chance to see the world ; 
and he was never at a loss for something to do. There 
were stray books to be found even in the cabins of the 
remotest settlers ; or, if not, there was the piquant liter- 
ary gossip of those laughing times of Queen Anne, but 
just gone by, to rehearse and comment upon. Colonel 
Byrd was not at a loss to find interesting ways in which 
even a busy man might make shift to enjoy " the Caro- 
lina felicity of having nothing to do." A rough people 
lived upon that frontier in his day, who showed them- 
selves very anxious to be put upon the southern side of 
the line; for, if taken into Virginia, "they must have 
submitted to some sort of order and government ; 
whereas in North Carolina every one does what seems 
best in his own eyes." " They pay no tribute," he 
laughs, " either to God or to Caesar." It would not be 
amiss, he thinks, were the clergy in Virginia, once in 
two or three years — not to make the thing burdensome 
— to "take a turn among these gentiles." " 'T would 



IN WASHINGTON'S DAY 35 

look a little apostolical," he argues, with the character- 
istic twinkle in his eye, " and they might hope to be re- 
quited for it hereafter, if that be not thought too long 
to tarry for their reward." A stray parson was to be 
found once and again even at the depths of the forest — 
on the Virginian side — though to find his humble quar- 
ters you must needs thread " a path as narrow as that 
which leads to heaven, but much more dirty"; but a 
stray parson was no great evangel. Colonel Byrd was 
too sound a gentleman not to be a good churchman ; but 
he accounted it no sin to see w r here the humor lurks 
even in church. " Mr. Betty, the parson of the parish, 
entertained us with a good, honest sermon," he chroni- 
cles upon occasion ; " but whether he bought it, or bor- 
rowed it, would have been uncivil in us to inquire Be 
that as it will, he is a decent man, with a double chin 
that fits gracefully over his band. . . . When church was 
done we refreshed our teacher with a glass of wine, and 
then, receiving his blessing, took horse." 'Tis likely 
Colonel Byrd would have found small amusement in 
narrating the regular course of his life, his great errands 
and permanent concerns of weighty business. That he 
could as well leave to his biographer, should he chance 
to have one. For himself, he chose to tell the unusual 
things he had seen and heard and taken part in, and to 
make merry as well as he might by the way. 

The Virginian writers were not all country gentle- 
men. There were austere and stately scholars, too, like 
the Keverend William Stith, who had held modest liv- 
ings in more than one parish, had served the House of 
Burgesses as chaplain, and the college, first as instructor 
and then as president, until at length, having won "per- 
fect leisure and retirement," he set himself in his last 



36 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

days to straighten into order the confusion of early Vir- 
ginian history. " Such a work," he reflected, " will be a 
noble and elegant entertainment for my vacant hours, 
which it is not in my power to employ more to my own 
satisfaction, or the use and benefit of my country." 
What with his scholarly love of documents set forth at 
length, however, his painstaking recital of details, and 
his roundabout, pedantic style, his story of the first sev- 
enteen years of the colony lingered through a whole 
volume ; and his friends' laggard subscriptions to that 
single prolix volume discouraged him from undertaking 
another. There was neither art nor quick movement 
enough in such work, much as scholars have prized it 
since, to take the taste of a generation that lived its 
life on horseback and spiced it with rough sport and 
direct speech. They could read with more patience the 
plain, business-like sentences of the Reverend Hugh 
Jones's Present State of Virginia, and with more zest 
the downright, telling words in which the Reverend 
James Blair, " commissary " to the Bishop of London, 
spoke of their affairs. 

James Blair, though born and bred in Scotland, edu- 
cated at Edinburgh, and engaged as a minister at home 
till he was close upon thirty years of age, was, as much 
a Yirginian in his life and deeds as any man born in 
the Old Dominion. 'Twas he who had been the chief 
founder of the College of William and Mary, and who 
had served it as president through every vicissitude of 
fortune for fifty years. For fifty years he was a mem- 
ber, too, of the Kings Council in the colony, and for 
fifty-eight the chief adviser of the mother Church in 
England concerning ecclesiastical affairs in Virginia. 
" Probably no other man in the colonial time did so 



IN WASHINGTON'S DAY 37 

much for the intellectual life of Virginia" as did this 
" sturdy and faithful " Scotsman. To the colonists, 
oftentimes, he seemed overbearing, dictatorial even, and, 
for all their " gentlemanly conformity to the Church of 
England," they did not mean to suffer any man to be 
set over them as bishop in Virginia ; while to the royal 
governors he seemed sometimes a headstrong agitator 
and demagogue, so stoutly did he stand up for the lib- 
erties of the people among whom he had cast his lot. 
He was in all things a doughty Scot. He made very 
straight for the ends he deemed desirable; dealt frank- 
ly, honestly, fearlessly with all men alike ; confident of 
being in the right even when he was in the wrong ; deal- 
ing with all as he thought he ought to deal, " whether 
they liked it or not"; incapable of discouragement, as he 
was also incapable of dishonor ; a stalwart, formidable 
master of all work in church and college, piling up 
every day to his credit a great debt of gratitude from 
the colony, which honored him without quite liking him. 
It was very noteworthy that masterful men of many 
kinds took an irresistible liking to Virginia, though they 
were but sent upon an errand to it. There was Alex- 
ander Spotswood, for example, who, after he had been 
twelve years Lieutenant-Governor in the stead of his 
lordship the Earl of Orkney, spent eighteen more good 
years, all he had left, upon the forty -odd thousand acres 
of land he had acquired in the fair colony, as a country 
gentleman, very busy developing the manufacture of 
iron, and as busy as there was any need to be as Post- 
master-General of the colonies. He came of a sturdy 
race of gentlemen, had seen service along with Marlbor- 
ough and my uncle Toby " with the army in Flanders," 
had gone much about the world upon many errands 



38 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

and seen all manner of people, and then had found him- 
self at last in Virginia when he was past forty. For all 
its rough life, he liked the Old Dominion well enough 
to adopt it as his home. There was there, he said, 
" less swearing, less profaneness, less drunkenness and 
debauchery, less uncharitable feuds and animosities, 
and less knavery and villany than in any part of the 
world " where his lot had been. Not all of his neigh- 
bors were gentlemen ; not very many could afford to 
send their sons to England to be educated. Men of all 
sorts had crowded into Virginia : merchants and gentle- 
men not a few, but also commoner men a great many — 
mariners, artisans, tailors, and men without settled trades 
or handicrafts of any kind. Spotswood had found it no 
easy matter when he was Governor to deal patiently 
with a House of Burgesses to which so many men of 
" mean understandings " had been sent, and had allowed 
himself to wax very sarcastic when he found how igno- 
rant some of them were. " I observe," he said, tartly, 
"that the grand ruling party in your House has not 
furnished chairmen of two of your standing committees 
who can spell English or write common - sense, as the 
grievances under their own handwriting will manifest." 
'Twas not a country, either, where one could travel 
much at ease, for one must ford the streams for lack 
of bridges, and keep an eye sharply about him as he 
travelled the rude forest roads when the wind was high 
lest a rotten tree should fall upon him. Nature was so 
bountiful, yielded so easy a largess of food, that few men 
took pains to be thrifty, and some parts of the colony 
were little more advanced in the arts of life than North 
Carolina, where, Colonel Byrd said, nothing was dear 
" but law, physic, and strong drink." No doubt the 






IN WASHINGTON'S DAY 39 

average colonist in Virginia, when not sobered by im- 
portant cares, was apt to be a fellow of coarse fibre, 
whose 

' ' addiction was to courses vain ; 
His companies unlettered, rude, and shallow ; 
His hours fill'd up with riots, banquets, sports ; 
And never noted in him any study, 
Any retirement, any sequestration 
From open haunts and popularity." 

Bat to many a scapegrace had come "reformation in 
a flood, with such a heady current, scouring faults," as 
to make a notable man of him. There were at least 
the traditions of culture in the colony, and enough men 
of education and refinement to leaven the mass. Life 
ran generously, even if roughly, upon the scattered 
plantations, and strong, thinking, high-bred men had 
somehow a mastery and leadership in it all which made 
them feel Virginia their home and field of honor. 

Change of time and of affairs, the stir of growing life 
in Virginia as she ceased from being a mere colony and 
became a sturdy commonwealth, boasting her own 
breed of gentlemen, merchants, scholars, and statesmen, 
laid upon the Washingtons, as upon other men, a touch 
of transformation. Seventy-six years had gone by since 
John Washington came out of Bedfordshire and took up 
lands on Bridges' Creek in Westmoreland in Virginia, 
and still his children were to be found in the old seats 
he had chosen at the first. They had become thorough 
Virginians with the rest, woven into the close fibre of 
the new life. Westmoreland and all the counties that 
lay about it on the Northern Neck were strictly of a 
piece with the rest of Virginia, for all they had waited 
long to be settled. There the Washingtons had become 



40 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

country gentlemen of comfortable estate upon the ac- 
cepted model. John had begotten Lawrence, and Law- 
rence had begotten Augustine. John had thriftily taken 
care to see his offspring put in a way to prosper at the 
very first. He had acquired a substantial property of 
his own where the land lay very fertile upon the banks 
of the Potomac, and he had, besides, by three marriages, 
made good a very close connection with several fami- 
lies that had thriven thereabouts before him. He had 
become a notable figure, indeed, among his neighbors 
ere he had been many years in the colony — a colonel in 
their militia, and their representative in the House of 
Burgesses; and they had not waited for his death to call 
the parish in which he lived Washington Parish. His 
sons and grandsons, though they slackened a little the 
pace he had set them in his energy at the outset, throve 
none the less substantially upon the estates he had left 
them, abated nothing of the dignity and worth they had 
inherited, lived simply, and kept their place of respect 
in the parish and state. Wars came and went without 
disturbing incident for them, as the French moved upon 
the borders by impulse of politics from over sea ; and 
then long peace set in, equally without incident, to stay 
a whole generation, while good farming went quietly 
forward, and politicians at home and in the colonies 
planned another move in their game. It was in the 
mid-season of this time of poise, preparation, and expect- 
ancy that George Washington was born, on the 22d of 
February, in the year 1732, " about ten in the morning," 
William Gooch, gentlest of Marlborough's captains, be- 
ing Governor in Virginia. He came into the world at 
the plain but spacious homestead on Bridges' Creek, 
fourth son, fifth child, of Augustine Washington, and of 



IN WASHINGTON'S DAY 41 

the third generation from John Washington, son of the 
one-time rector of Purleigh. The homestead stood upon 
a green and gentle slope that fell away, at but a little 
distance, to the waters of the Potomac, and from it 
could be seen the broad reaches of the stream stretching 
wide to the Maryland shore beyond, and flooding with 
slow, full tide to the great bay below. The spot gave 
token of the quiet youth of the boy, of the years of 
grateful peace in which he was to learn the first lessons 
of life, ere war and the changing fortunes of his coun- 
try hurried him to the field and to the council. 



FAC-SIMILE OF THE ENTRY OF WASHINGTON'S BIRTH IN HIS MOTHER'S BIBLE 



A VIKGINIAN BREEDING 



CHAPTER II 

George Washington was cast for his career by a very 
scant and homely training. Augustine Washington, his 
father, lacked neither the will nor the means to set him 
handsomely afoot, with as good a schooling, both in 
books and in affairs, as was to be had ; he would have 
done all that a liberal and provident man should do to 
advance his boy in the world, had he lived to go with 
him through his youth. He owned land in four coun- 
ties, more than five thousand acres all told, and lying 
upon both the rivers that refresh the fruitful Northern 
Neck; besides several plots of ground in the promising 
village of Fredericksburg, which lay opposite his lands 
upon the Eappahannock ; and one-twelfth part of the 
stock of the Principio Iron Company, whose mines and 
furnaces in Maryland and Virginia yielded a better prolit 
than any others in the two colonies. He had com- 
manded a ship in his time, as so many of his neighbors 
had in that maritime province, carrying iron from the 
mines to England, and no doubt bringing convict labor- 
ers back upon his voyage home again. He himself 
raised the ore from the mines that lay upon his own 
land, close to the Potomac, and had it carried the easy 
six miles to the river. Matters were very well managed 
there, Colonel Byrd said, and no pains were spared to 
make the business profitable. Captain Washington had 



46 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

represented his home parish of Truro, too, in the House 
of Burgesses, where his athletic figure, his ruddy skin, 
and frank gray eyes must have made him as conspicuous 
as his constituents could have wished. He was a man 
of the world, every inch, generous, hardj^, independent. 
He lived long enough, too, to see how stalwart and 
capable and of how noble a spirit his young son was to 
be, with how manly a bearing he was to carry himself in 
the world ; and had loved him and made him his compan- 
ion accordingly. But the end came for him before he 
could see the lad out of boyhood. He died April 12, 
1743, when he was but forty-nine years of age, and be- 
fore George was twelve ; and in his will there was, of 
course, for George only a younger son's portion. The 
active gentleman had been twice married, and there were 
seven children to be provided for. Two sons of the first 
marriage survived. The bulk of the estate went, as 
Virginian custom dictated, to Lawrence, the eldest son. 
To Augustine, the second son, fell most of the rich lands 
in Westmoreland. George, the eldest born of the second 
marriage, left to the guardianship of his young mother, 
shared with the four younger children the residue of the 
estate. He was to inherit his father's farm upon the 
Rappahannock, to possess, and to cultivate if he would, 
when he should come of age ; but for the rest his fort- 
unes were to make. He must get such serviceable 
training as he could for a life of independent endeavor. 
The two older brothers had been sent to England to get 
their schooling and preparation for life, as their father 
before them had been to get his — Lawrence to make 
ready to take his father's place when the time should 
come ; Augustine, it was at first planned, to fit himself 
for the law. George could now look for nothing of the 



A VIRGINIAN BREEDING 47 

kind. He must continue, as he had begun, to get such 
elementary and practical instruction as was to be had of 
schoolmasters in Virginia, and the young mother's care 
must stand him in the stead of a fathers pilotage and 
oversight. 

Fortunately Mary Washington was a wise and provi- 
dent mother, a woman of too firm a character and too 
steadfast a courage to be dismayed by responsibility. 
She had seemed only a fair and beautiful girl when 
Augustine Washington married her, and there was a 
romantic story told of how that gallant Yirginian sailor 
and gentleman had literally been thrown at her feet out 
of a carriage in the London streets by way of introduc- 
tion — where she, too, was a visiting stranger out of Vir- 
ginia. But she had shown a singular capacity for busi- 
ness when the romantic days of courtship were over. 
Lawrence Washington, too, though but five-and-twenty 
when his father died and left him head of the family, 
proved himself such an elder brother as it could but bet- 
ter and elevate a boy to have. For all he was so young, 
he had seen something of the world, and had already 
made notable friends. He had not returned home out 
of England until he was turned of twenty-one, and he 
had been back scarcely a twelvemonth before he was 
off again, to seek service in the war against Spain. The 
colonies had responded with an unwonted willingness 
and spirit in 1710 to the home government's call for 
troops to go against the Spaniard in the West Indies ; and 
Lawrence Washington had sought and obtained a com- 
mission as captain in the Virginian regiment which had 
volunteered for the duty. He had seen those terrible 
days at Cartagena, with Vernon's fleet and Wentworth's 
army, when the deadly heat and blighting damps of the 



48 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

tropics wrought a work of death which drove the Eng- 
lish forth as no fire from the Spanish cannon could. He 
had been one of that devoted force which threw itself 
twelve hundred strong upon Fort San Lazaro, and came 
away beaten with six hundred only. He had seen the 
raw provincials out of the colonies carry themselves as gal- 
lantly as any veterans through all the fiery trial ; had seen 
the storm and the valor, the vacillation and the blunder- 
ing, and the shame of all the rash affair; and had come 
away the friend and admirer of the gallant Vernon, de- 
spite his headstrong folly and sad miscarriage. He had 
reached home again, late in the year 1742, only to see 
his father presently snatched away by a sudden illness, 
and to find himself become head of the family in his 
stead. All thought of further service away from home 
was dismissed. He accepted a commission as major in 
the colonial militia, and an appointment as adjutant- 
general of the military district in which his lands lay ; 
but he meant that for the future his duties should be 
civil rather than military in the life he set himself to 
live, and turned very quietly to the business and the 
social duty of a proprietor among his neighbors in 
Fairfax County, upon the broad estates to which he 
gave the name Mount Vernon, in compliment to the 
brave sailor whose friend he had become in the far, un- 
happy South. 

Marriage was, of course, his first step towards domes- 
tication, and the woman he chose brought him into new 
connections which suited both his tastes and his train- 
ing. Three months after his father's death he married 
Anne Fairfax, daughter to William Fairfax, his neigh- 
bor. 'Twas William Fairfax's grand uncle Thomas, 
third Lord Fairfax, who had in that revolutionary year 



A VIRGINIAN BREEDING 49 

1646 summoned Colonel Henry Washington to give into 
his hands the city of Worcester, and who had got so sharp 
an answer from the King's stout soldier. But the Fair- 
faxes had soon enough turned royalists again when they 
saw whither the Parliament men would carry them. A 
hundred healing years had gone by since those unhappy 
days when the nation was arrayed against the King. 
Anne Fairfax brought no alien tradition to the house- 
hold of her young husband. Her father had served the 
King, as her lover had — with more hardship than re- 
ward, as behooved a soldier — in Spain and in the Baha- 
mas; and was now, when turned of fifty, agent here in 
Virginia to his cousin Thomas, sixth Baron Fairfax, in 
the management of his great estates, lying upon the 
Northern Neck and in the fruitful valleys beyond. 
William Fairfax had been but nine years in the colony, 
but he was already a Virginian like his neighbors, and, 
as collector of his Majesty's customs for the South Po- 
tomac and President of the King's Council, no small 
figure in their affairs — a man who had seen the world 
and knew how to bear himself in this part of it. 

In 1746 Thomas, Lord Fairfax, himself came to Vir- 
ginia — a man strayed out of the world of fashion at 
fifty-five into the forests of a wild frontier. The better 
part of his ancestral estates in Yorkshire had been sold 
to satisfy the creditors of his spendthrift father. These 
untilled stretches of land in the Old Dominion were now 
become the chief part of his patrimony. 'Twas said, 
too, that he had suffered a cruel misadventure in love at 
the hands of a fair jilt in London, and so had become 
the austere, eccentric bachelor he showed himself to be 
in the free and quiet colony. A man of taste and cult- 
ure, he had written with Addison and Steele for the 
4 



50 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

Spectator / a man of the world, he had acquired, for all 
his reserve, that easy touch and intimate mastery in 
dealing with men which come with the long practice 
of such men of fashion as are also men of sense. He 
brought with him to Virginia, though past fifty, the 
fresh vigor of a young man eager for the free pioneer 
life of such a province. He tarried but two years with 
his cousin, where the colony had settled to an ordered 
way of living. Then he built himself a roomy lodge, 
shadowed by spreading piazzas, and fitted with such 
simple appointments as sufficed for comfort at the 
depths of the forest, close upon seventy miles away, 
within the valley of the Shenandoah, where a hardy 
frontier people had but begun to gather. The great 
manor-house he had meant to build was never begun. 
The plain comforts of " Green way Court" satisfied him 
more and more easily as the years passed, and the habits 
of a simple life grew increasingly pleasant and familiar, 
till thirty years and more had slipped away and he was 
dead, at ninety-one — broken-hearted, men said, because 
the King's government had fallen upon final defeat and 
was done with in America. 

It was in the company of these men, and of those 
who naturally gathered about them in that hospita- 
ble country, that George Washington was bred. "A 
stranger had no more to do," says Beverley, " but to in- 
quire upon the road where any gentleman or good 
housekeeper lived, and there he might depend upon be- 
ing received with hospitality"; and 'twas certain many 
besides strangers would seek out the young major at 
Mount Yernon whom his neighbors had hastened to 
make their representative in the House of Burgesses, 
and the old soldier of the soldierly house of Fairfax 



A VIRGINIAN BREEDING 51 

who was President of the King's Council, and so next 
to the Governor himself. A boy who was much at 
Mount Yernon and at Mr. Fairfax's seat, Belvoir, might 
expect to see not a little that was worth seeing of the 
life of the colony. George was kept at school until 
he was close upon sixteen ; but there was ample vaca- 
tion-time for visiting. Mrs. Washington did not keep 
him at her apron-strings. He even lived, when it was 
necessary, with his brother Augustine, at the old home 
on Bridges' Creek, in order to be near the best school 
that was accessible, while the mother was far away on 
the farm that lay upon the Rappahannock. Mrs. Wash- 
ington saw to it, nevertheless, that she should not lose 
sight of him altogether. When he was fourteen it was 
proposed that he should be sent to sea, as so many lads 
were, no doubt, from that maritime province ; but the 
prudent mother preferred he should not leave Virginia, 
and the schooling went on as before — the schooling of 
books and manly sports. Every lad learned to ride — to 
ride colt or horse, regardless of training, gait, or temper 
— in that country, where no one went afoot except to 
catch his mount in the pasture. Every lad, black or 
white, bond or free, knew where to find and how to take 
the roving game in the forests. And young Washing- 
ton, robust boy that he was, not to be daunted while 
that strong spirit sat in him which he got from his 
father 'and mother alike, took his apprenticeship on 
horseback and in the tangled woods with characteristic 
zest and ardor. 

He was, above all things else, a capable, executive 
boy. He loved mastery, and he relished acquiring the 
most effective means of mastery in all practical affairs. 
His very exercise-books used at school gave proof of it. 



52 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

They were filled, not only with the rules, formulae, dia- 
grams, and exercises of surveying, which he was taking- 
special pains to learn, at the advice of his friends, but 
also with careful copies of legal and mercantile papers, 
bills of exchange, bills of sale, bonds, indentures, land 
warrants, leases, deeds, and wills, as if he meant to be a 
lawyer's or a merchant's clerk. It would seem that, pas- 
sionate and full of warm blood as he was, he conned 
these things as he studied the use and structure of his 
fowling-piece, the bridle he used for his colts, his saddle- 
girth, and the best ways of mounting. He copied these 
forms of business as he might have copied Beverley's 
account of the way fox or 'possum or beaver was to be 
taken or the wild turkey trapped. The men he most 
admired — his elder brothers, Mr. Fairfax, and the gentle- 
men planters who were so much at their houses — were 
most of them sound men of business, who valued good 
surveying as much as they admired good horsemanship 
and skill in sport. They were their own merchants, and 
looked upon forms of business paper as quite as useful 
as ploughs and hogsheads. Careful exercise in such 
matters might well enough accompany practice in the 
equally formal minuet in Virginia. And so this boy 
learned to show in almost everything he did the careful 
precision of the perfect marksman. 

In the autumn of 1747, when he was not yet quite 
sixteen, George quit his formal schooling, and presently 
joined his brother Lawrence at Mount Vernon, to seek 
counsel and companionship. Lawrence had conceived a 
strong affection for his manly younger brother. Him- 
self a man of spirit and honor, he had a high-hearted 
man's liking for all that he saw that was indomitable 
and well-purposed in the lad, a generous man's tender- 



A VIRGINIAN BREEDING 53 

ness in looking to the development of this thoroughbred 
boy; and he took him into his confidence as if he had 
been his own son. Not only upon his vacations now, but 
almost when he would, and as if he were already him- 
self a man with the rest, he could live in the comrade- 
ship that obtained at Belvoir and Mount Vernon. Men 
of all sorts, it seemed, took pleasure in his company. 
Lads could be the companions of men in Virginia. Her 
outdoor life of journeyings, sport, adventure, put them, 
as it were, upon equal terms with their elders, where 
spirit, audacity, invention, prudence, manliness, resource, 
told for success and comradeship. Young men and old 
can be companions in arms, in sport, in woodcraft, and 
on the trail of the fox. 'Twas not an indoor life of 
conference, but an outdoor life of affairs in this rural 
colony. One man, indeed, gave at least a touch of an- 
other quality to the life Washington saw. This was 
Lord Fairfax, who had been almost two years in Vir- 
ginia when the boy quit school, and who was now deter- 
mined, as soon as might be, to take up his residence at 
his forest lodge within the Blue Ridge. George greatly 
struck his lordship's fancy, as he did that of all capable 
men, as a daring lad in the hunt and a sober lad in 
counsel ; and, drawn into such companionship, he learned 
a great deal that no one else in Virginia could have 
taught him so well — the scrupulous deportment of a 
high-bred and honorable man of the world ; the use of 
books by those who preferred affairs ; the way in which 
strength may be rendered gracious, and independence 
made generous. A touch of Old World address was to 
be learned at Belvoir. 

His association with Lord Fairfax, moreover, put him 
in the way of making his first earnings as a surveyor. 



54 



GEORGE WASHINGTON 



Fairfax had not come to America merely to get away 
from the world of fashion in London and bury himself 
in the wilderness. His chief motive was one which did 
him much more credit, and bespoke him a man and a 
true colonist. It was his purpose, he declared, to open 
up, settle, and cultivate the vast tracts of beautiful and 
fertile land he had inherited in Virginia, and he proved 
his sincerity by immediately setting about the business. 
It was necessary as a first step that he should have sur- 
veys made, in order that he might know how his lands 
lay, how bounded and disposed through the glades and 
upon the streams of the untrodden forests ; and in young 
Washington he had a surveyor ready to his hand. The 
lad was but sixteen, indeed; was largely self-taught in 
surveying ; and had had no business yet that made test 
of his quality. But surveyors were scarce, and boys 
were not tender at sixteen in that robust, out-of-door 
colony. Fairfax had an eye for capacity. He knew the 
athletic boy to be a fearless woodsman, with that odd, 
calm judgment looking forth at his steady gray eyes; 
perceived how seriously he took himself in all that he 
did, and how thorough he was at succeeding ; and had 
no doubt he could run his lines through the thicketed 
forests as well as any man. At any rate, he commis- 
sioned him to undertake the task, and was not disap- 
pointed in the way he performed it. Within a very few 
weeks Washington conclusively showed his capacity. 
In March, 1748, with George Fairfax, William Fairfax's 
son, for company, he rode forth with his little band of 
assistants through the mountains to the wild country 
where his work lay, and within the month almost he 
was back again, with maps and figures which showed 
his lordship very clearly what lands he had upon the 



A VIRGINIAN BREEDING 55 

sparkling Shenandoah and the swollen upper waters of 
the Potomac. 'Twas all he wanted before making his 
home where his estate lay in the wilderness. Before the 
year was out he had established himself at Greenway 
Court; huntsmen and tenants and guests had found 
their way thither, and life was fairly begun upon the 
rough rural barony. 

It had been wild and even perilous work for the young 
surveyor, but just out of school, to go in the wet spring- 
time into that wilderness, when the rivers were swollen 
and ugly with the rains and melting snows from off the 
mountains, where there was scarcely a lodging to be 
had except in the stray, comfortless cabins of the scat- 
tered settlers, or on the ground about a fire in the open 
woods, and where a woodman's wits were needed to 
come even tolerably off. But there was a strong relish 
in such an experience for Washington, which did not 
wear off with the novelty of it. There is an unmistaka- 
ble note of boyish satisfaction in the tone in which he 
speaks of it. " Since you received my letter in October 
last," he writes to a young comrade, " I have not sleep'd 
above three nights or four in a bed, but, after walking a 
good deal all the day, I lay down before the fire upon a 
little hay, straw, fodder, or bear-skin, whichever is to be 
had, with man, wife, and children, like a parcel of clogs 
and cats ; and happy is he who gets the berth nearest 
the fire. . . . I have never had my clothes off, but lay 
and sleep in them, except the few nights I have lay'n 
in Frederick Town." For three years he kept steadily 
at the trying business, without loss either of health or 
courage, now deep in the forests laboriously laying off 
the rich bottom lands and swelling hill -sides of that 
wild but goodly country between the mountains, now at 



5 6 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

Greenway Court with his lordship, intent upon the busy 
life there, — following the hounds, consorting with hunts- 
men and Indians and traders, waiting upon the ladies 
who now and again visited the lodge ; when other occu- 
pations failed, reading up and down in his lordship's copy 
of the Spectator, or in the historians who told the great 
English story. His first success in surveying brought 
him frequent employment in the valley. Settlers were 
steadily making their way thither, who must needs have 
their holdings clearly bounded and defined. Upon his 
lordship's recommendation and his own showing of what 
he knew and could do, he obtained appointment at the 
hands of the President and Master of William and Mary, 
the colony's careful agent in the matter, as official sur- 
veyor for Culpeper County, " took the usual oaths to his 
Majesty's person and government," and so got for his 
work the privilege of authoritative public record. 

Competent surveyors were much in demand, and, 
when once he had been officially accredited in his pro- 
fession, Washington had as much to do both upon new 
lands and old as even a young man's energy and liking 
for an independent income could reasonably demand. 
His home he made with his brother at Mount Vernon, 
where he was always so welcome ; and he was as often as 
possible with his mother at her place upon the Rappa- 
hannock, to lend the efficient lady such assistance as she 
needed in the business of the estate she held for herself 
and her children. At odd intervals he studied tactics, 
practised the manual of arms, or took a turn at the 
broadsword with the old soldiers who so easily found 
excuses for visiting Major Washington at Mount Ver- 
non. But, except when winter weather forbade him the 
fields, he was abroad, far and near, busy with his sur- 



A VIRGINIAN BREEDING 57 

veying, and incidentally making trial of his neighbors 
up and down all the country-side round about, as his 
errands threw their open doors in his way. His pleas- 
ant bearing and his quiet satisfaction at being busy, his 
manly, efficient ways, his evident self-respect, and his 
frank enjoyment of life, the engaging mixture in him of 
man and boy, must have become familiar to everybody 
worth knowing throughout all the Northern Neck. 

But three years put a term to his surveying. In 1751 
he was called imperatively off, and had the whole course 
of his life changed, by the illness of his brother. Law- 
rence Washington had never been robust ; those long 
months spent at the heart of the fiery South with Ver- 
non's fever-stricken fleet had touched his sensitive con- 
stitution to the quick, and at last a fatal consumption 
fastened upon him. Neither a trip to England nor the 
waters of the warm springs at home brought him re- 
cuperation, and in the autumn of 1751 his physician 
ordered him to the Bahamas for the winter. George 
whom he so loved and trusted, went with him, to nurse 
and cheer him. But even the gentle sea -air of the 
islands wrought no cure of the stubborn malady. The 
sterling, gifted, lovable gentleman, who had made his 
quiet seat at Mount Yernon the home of so much that 
was honorable and of good report, came back the next 
summer to die in his prime, at thirty-four. George found 
himself named executor in his brother's will, and looked 
to of a sudden to guard all the interests of the young 
widow and her little daughter in the management of a 
large estate. That trip to the Bahamas had been his 
last outing as a boy. He had enjoyed the novel journey 
with a very keen and natural relish while it promised 
his brother health. The radiant air of those summer 



58 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

isles had touched him with a new pleasure, and the cor- 
dial hospitality of the homesick colonists had added 
the satisfaction of a good welcome. He had braved the 
small-pox in one household with true Virginian punctilio 
rather than refuse an invitation to dinner, had taken the 
infection, and had come home at last bearing some per- 
manent marks of a three weeks' sharp illness upon him. 
But he had had entertainment enough to strike the bal- 
ance handsomely against such inconveniences, had borne 
whatever came in his way very cheerily, with that whole- 
some strength of mind which made older men like him, 
and would have come off remembering nothing but the 
pleasure of the trip had his noble brother only found 
his health again. As it was, Lawrence's death put a 
final term to his youth. Five other executors were 
named in the will ; but George, as it turned out, was to 
be looked to to carry the burden of administration, and 
gave full proof of the qualities that had made his brother 
trust him with so generous a confidence. 

His brother's death, in truth, changed everything for 
him. He seemed of a sudden to stand as Lawrence's 
representative. Before they set out for the Bahamas 
Lawrence had transferred to him his place in the militia, 
obtaining for him, though he was but nineteen, a com- 
mission as major and district adjutant in his stead ; and 
after his return, in 1752, Lieutenant-Governor Din w id- 
die, the crown's new representative in Virginia, added 
still further to his responsibilities as a soldier by re- 
ducing the military districts of the colony to four, and 
assigning to him one of the four, under a renewed 
commission as major and adjutant-general. His broth- 
er's will not only named him an executor, but also made 
him residuary legatee of the estate of Mount Vernon in 



A VIRGINIAN BREEDING 59 

case his child should die. He had to look to the disci- 
pline and accoutrement of the militia of eleven counties, 
aid his mother in her business, administer his brother's 
estate, and assume on all hands the duties and responsi- 
bilities of a man of affairs when he was but just turned 
of twenty. 

The action of the colonial government in compacting 
the organization and discipline of the militia by reduc- 
ing the number of military districts was significant of 
a sinister change in the posture of affairs beyond the 
borders. The movements of the French in the West had 
of late become more ominous than ever; 'twas possible 
the Virginian militia might any day see an end of that 
" everlasting peace" which good Mr. Beverley had smiled 
to see them complacently enjoy, and that the young 
major, who was now Adjutant-General of the Northern 
Division, might find duties abroad even more serious and 
responsible than his duties at home. Whoever should 
be commissioned to meet and deal with the French 
upon the Avestern rivers would have to handle truly crit- 
ical affairs, decisive of the fate of the continent, and it 
looked as if Virginia must undertake the fateful busi- 
ness. The northern borders, indeed, were sadly har- 
ried by the savage allies of the French ; the brunt of the 
fighting hitherto had fallen upon the hardy militiamen 
of Massachusetts and Connecticut in the slow contest 
for English mastery upon the continent. But there was 
really nothing to be decided in that quarter. The French 
were not likely to attempt the mad task of driving out 
the thickly set English population, already established, 
hundreds of thousands strong, upon the eastern coasts. 
Their true lines of conquest ran within. Their strength 
lay in their command of the great watercourses which 



60 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

flanked the English colonies both north and west. 'Twas 
a long frontier to hold, that mazy line of lake and river 
that ran all the way from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the 
wide mouths of the sluggish Mississippi. Throughout 
all the posts and settlements that lay upon it from end 
to end there were scarcely eighty thousand Frenchmen, 
while the English teemed upon the coasts more than a 
million strong-. But the forces of New France could 
be handled like an army, while the English swarmed 
slowly westward, without discipline or direction, the 
headstrong subjects of a distant government they would 
not obey, the wayward constituents of a score of petty 
and jealous assemblies tardy at planning, clumsy at 
executing plans. They were still far away, too, from 
the mid-waters of the lakes and from the royal stream 
of the Mississippi itself, where lonely boats floated 
slowly down, with their cargoes of grain, meat, tallow, 
tobacco, oil, hides, and lead, out of the country of the 
Illinois, past the long, thin line of tiny isolated posts, to 
the growing village at New Orleans and the southern 
Gulf. But they were to be feared, none the less. If 
their tide once flowed in, the French well knew it could 
not be turned back again. It was not far away from 
the Ohio now ; and if once settlers out of Pennsylvania 
and Virginia gained a foothold in any numbers on that 
river, they would control one of the great highways 
that led to the main basins of the continent. It was 
imperative they should be effectually forestalled, and 
that at once. 

The Marquis Duquesne, with his quick soldier blood, 
at last took the decisive step for France. lie had hard- 
ly come to his colony, to serve his royal master as Gov- 
ernor upon the St. Lawrence, when he determined to 



A VIRGINIAN BREEDING 61 

occupy the upper waters of the Ohio, and block the 
western passes against the English with a line of military 
posts. The matter did not seem urgent to the doubting- 
ministers at Versailles. " Be on your guard against 
new undertakings," said official letters out of France ; 
" private interests are generally at the bottom of them.' 5 
But Duquesne knew that it was no mere private interest 
of fur trader or speculator that was at stake now. The 
rivalry between the two nations had gone too far to 
make it possible to draw back. Military posts had al- 
ready been established by the bold energy of the French 
at Niagara, the key to the western lakes, and at Crown 
Point upon Champlain, where lake and river struck 
straight towards the heart of the English trading set- 
tlements upon the Hudson. The English, accepting the 
challenge, had planted themselves at Oswego, upon the 
very lake route itself, and had made a port there to 
take the furs that came out of the West, and, though 
very sluggish in the business, showed purpose of ag- 
gressive movement everywhere that advantage offered. 
English settlers by the hundred were pressing towards 
the western mountains in Pennsylvania, and down into 
that " Virginian Arcady," the sweet valley of the Shen- 
andoah : thrifty Germans, a few ; hardy Scots-Irish, a 
great many — the blood most to be feared and checked. 
It was said that quite three hundred English traders 
passed the mountains every year into the region of the 
Ohio. Enterprising gentlemen in Virginia — Lawrence 
and Augustine Washington among the rest — had joined 
influential partners in London in the formation of an 
Ohio Company for the settlement of the western coun- 
try and the absorption of the western trade ; had sent 
out men who knew the region to make interest with 



62 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

the Indians and fix upon points of vantage for trading- 
posts and settlements; had already set out upon the busi- 
ness by erecting storehouses at Will's Creek, in the heart 
of the Alleghanies, and, farther westward still, upon 
Redstone Creek, a branch of the Monongahela itself. 

It was high time to act; and Duquesne, having no 
colonial assembly to hamper him, acted very promptly. 
When spring came, 1753, he sent fifteen hundred men 
into Lake Erie, to Presque Isle, where a fort of squared 
logs was built, and a road cut through the forests to a 
little river whose waters, when at the flood, would carry 
boats direct to the Alleghany and the great waterway of 
the Ohio itself. An English lieutenant at Oswego had 
descried the multitudinous fleet of canoes upon Ontario 
carrying this levy to its place of landing in the lake 
beyond, and a vagrant Frenchman had told him plainly 
what it was. It was an army of six thousand men, he 
boasted, going to the Ohio, " to cause all the English to 
quit those parts." It was plain to every English Gov- 
ernor in the colonies who had his eyes open that the 
French would not stop with planting a fort upon an ob- 
scure branch of the Alleghany, but that they would 
indeed press forward to take possession of the Ohio, 
drive every English trader forth, draw all the native 
tribes to their interest by force or favor, and close alike 
the western lands and the western trade in very earnest 
against all the King's subjects. 

Governor Dinwiddie was among the first to see the 
danger and the need for action, as, in truth, was very 
natural. In office and out, his study had been the co- 
lonial trade, and he had been merchant and official now 
a long time. He was one of the twenty stockholders of 
the Ohio Company, and had come to his governorship 



A VIRGINIAN BREEDING 63 

in Virginia with his eye upon the western country. He 
had but to look about him to perceive that Virginia 
would very likely be obliged to meet the crisis unaided, 
if, indeed, he could induce even her to meet it. Gov- 
ernor Hamilton, of Pennsylvania, also saw how critical- 
ly affairs stood, it is true, and what ought to be done. 
His agents had met and acted with the agents of the 
Ohio Company already in seeking Indian alliances and 
fixing upon points of vantage beyond the Alleghanies. 
But the Pennsylvania Assembly could by no argument 
or device be induced to vote money or measures in the 
business. The placid Quaker traders were as stubborn as 
the stolid German farmers. They opposed warlike ac- 
tion on principle. The Germans opposed it because 
they could not for the life of them see the necessity of 
parting with their money to send troops upon so remote 
an errand. Dinwiddie did not wait or parley. He 
acted first, and consulted his legislature afterwards. It 
was in his Scots blood to take the business very strenu- 
ously, and in his trader's blood to take it very anxious- 
ly. He had kept himself advised from the first of the 
movements of the French. Their vanguard had scarce- 
ly reached Presque Isle ere he despatched letters to Eng- 
land apprising the government of the danger. Answer 
had come very promptly, too, authorizing him to build 
forts upon the Ohio, if he could get the money from the 
Burgesses ; and meantime, should the French trespass 
further, " to require of them peaceably to depart." If 
they would not desist for a warning, said his Majesty, 
" we do hereby strictly charge and command you to 
drive them off by force of arras." 

Even to send a warning to the French was no easy 
matter when the King's letter came and the chill au- 



64 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

turan rains were at hand. The mountain streams, al- 
ready swollen, presently to be full of ice, would be very 
dangerous for men and horses, and the forests were 
likely enough to teem with hostile savages, now the 
French were there. A proper messenger was found 
and despatched, nevertheless — young Major George 
Washington, of the Northern District. The errand lay 
in his quarter ; his three years of surveying at the heart 
of the wilderness had made him an experienced woods- 
man and hardy traveller, had tested his pluck and made 
proof of his character ; he was well known upon the 
frontier, and his friends were very influential, and very 
cordial in recommending him for this or any other 
manly service that called for steadiness, hardihood, and 
resource. Dinwiddie had been a correspondent of Law- 
rence Washington's ever since the presidency of the 
Ohio Company had fallen to the young Virginian upon 
the death of .his neighbor Thomas Lee, writing to him 
upon terms of intimacy. He knew the stock of which 
George, the younger brother, came, and the interests in 
which he might be expected to embark with ardor ; he 
could feel that he took small risk in selecting such an 
agent. Knowing him, too, thus through his family and 
like a friend, he did not hesitate in writing to Governor 
Hamilton, of Pennsylvania, to speak of this }^outh of 
twenty-one as " a person of distinction." 

Washington performed his errand as Dinwiddie must 
have expected he would. He received his commission 
and the Governor's letter to the French commandant on 
the last da}^ of October, and set out the same day for 
the mountains. Jacob Vanbraam, the Dutch soldier of 
fortune who had been his fencing-master at Mount Ver- 
non, accompanied him as interpreter, and Christopher 



A VIRGINIAN BREEDING 65 

Gist, the hardy, self-reliant frontier trader, whom the 
Ohio Company had employed to make interest for them 
among the Indians of the far region upon the western 
rivers which he knew so well, was engaged to act as his 
guide and counsellor ; and with a few servants and pack- 
horses he struck straight into the forests in the middle 
of bleak November. It was the 11th of December be- 
fore the jaded party rode, in the cold dusk, into the 
drenched and miry clearing where the dreary little fort 
stood that held the French commander Through two 
hundred and fifty miles and more of forest they had 
dragged themselves over swollen rivers, amidst an almost 
ceaseless fall of rain or snow, with not always an Indian 
trail, even, or the beaten track of the bison, to open the 
forest growth for their flagging horses, and on the 
watch always against savage treacherv. It had become 
plain enough before they reached their destination what 
answer they should get from the French. Sixty miles 
nearer home than these lonely headquarters of the French 
commander at Fort Le Boeuf they had come upon an 
outpost where the French colors were to be seen flying 
from a house from which an English trader had been 
driven out, and the French officers there had uttered 
brutally frank avowal of their purpose in that wilderness 
as they sat at wine with the alert and temperate young 
Virginian. " It was their absolute design," they said, 
" to take possession of the Ohio, and, by G — , they 
would do it. . . . They were sensible the English 
could raise two men for their one, yet they knew their 
motions were too slow and dilatory to prevent any un- 
dertaking of theirs." The commandant at Fort Le 
Bceuf received the wayworn ambassador very courte- 
ously, and even graciously — a thoughtful elderly man, 



66 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

Washington noted him, " with much the air of a soldier" 
— but would make no profession even that he would 
consider the English summons to withdraw ; and the 
little party of Englishmen presently turned back amidst 
the winter's storms to carry through the frozen wilder- 
ness a letter which boasted the French lawful masters 
of all the continent beyond the Alleghanies. When 
Washington reached Williamsburg, in the middle of 
January, 175i, untouched by even the fearful fatigues 
and anxieties of that daring journey, he had accom- 
plished nothing but the establishment of his own char- 
acter in the eyes of the men who were to meet the crisis 
now at hand. He had been at infinite pains, at every 
stage of the dreary adventure, to win and hold the con- 
fidence of the Indians who were accounted friends of 
the English, and had displayed an older man's patience, 
address, and fortitude in meeting all their subtle shifts ; 
and he had borne hardships that tried even the doughty 
Gist. When the horses gave out, he had left them to 
come by easier stages, while he made his way afoot, 
with only a single companion, across the weary leagues 
that lay upon his homeward way. Gist, his comrade in 
the hazard, had been solicitously " unwilling he should 
undertake such a travel, who had never been used to 
walking before this time," but the imperative young 
commander would not be stayed, and the journe}^ was 
made, spite of sore feet and frosts and exhausting weari- 
ness. He at least knew what the French were about, 
with what strongholds and forces, and could afford to 
await orders what to do next. 



COLONEL WASHINGTON 



CHAPTER III 

Dinwiddie had not been idle while Washington went 
his perilous errand. He had gotten the Burgesses to- 
gether by the 1st of November, before Washington had 
left the back settlements to cross the wilderness, and 
would have gotten a liberal grant of money from them 
had they not fallen in their debates upon the question 
of the new fee charged, since his coming, for every 
grant out of the public lands of the colony, and insisted 
that it should be done away with. " Subjects," they ' 
said, very stubbornly, " cannot be deprived of the least 
part of their propert}^ without their consent ;" and such 
a fee, they thought, was too like a tax, to be endured. 
They would withhold the grant, they declared, unless 
the fee was abolished, notwithstanding they saw plainly 
enough in how critical a case things stood in the West ; 
and the testy Governor very indignantly sent them 
home again. He ordered a draft of two hundred men 
from the militia, nevertheless, with the purpose of as- 
signing the command to Washington and seeing what 
might be done upon the Ohio, without vote of Assembly. 
A hard-headed Scotsman past sixty could not be ex- 
pected to wait upon a body of wrangling and factious 
provincials for leave to perform his duty in a crisis, and, 
inasmuch as the object was to save their own lands, 
and perhaps their own persons, from the French, could 



70 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

hardly be blamed for proposing in his anger that they 
be taxed for the purpose by act of Parliament. " A 
Governor," he exclaimed, " is really to be pitied in the 
discharge of his duty to his King and country in having 
to do with such obstinate, self-conceited people !" Some 
money he advanced out of his own pocket. When 
Washington came back from his fruitless mission, Din- 
widdie ordered his journal printed and copies sent to 
all the colonial Governors. " As it was thought advisa- 
ble by his Honour the Governor to have the following 
account of my proceedings to and from the French on 
Ohio committed to print,-' said the modest young major, 
" I think I can do no less than apologize, in some meas- 
ure, for the numberless imperfections of it." But it was 
a very manly recital of noteworthy things, and touched 
the imagination and fears of every thoughtful man who 
read it quite as near the quick as the urgent and re- 
peated letters of the troubled Dinwiddie. 

Virginia, it turned out, was, after all, more forward 
than her neighbors when it came to action. The Penn- 
sylvania Assembly very coolly declared they doubted 
his Majesty's claim to the lands on the Ohio, and the 
Assembly in New York followed suit. " It appears," 
they said, in high judicial tone, " that the French have 
built a fort at a place called French Creek, at a consid- 
erable distance from the river Ohio, which may, but 
does not by any evidence or information appear to us to 
be, an invasion of any of his Majesty's colonies." The 
Governors of the other colonies whose safety was most 
directly menaced by the movements of the French in 
the West were thus even less able to act than Dinwid- 
die. For the Virginian Burgesses, though they would 
not yield the point of the fee upon land grants, did not 



COLONEL WASHINGTON 71 

mean to leave Major Washington in the lurch, and be- 
fore an expedition could be got afoot had come together 
again to vote a sum of money. It would be possible 
with the sura they appropriated to put three or four 
hundred men into the field ; and as spring drew on, raw 
volunteers began to gather in some numbers at Alexan- 
dria — a ragged regiment, made up for the most part of 
idle and shiftless men, who did not always have shoes, or 
even shirts, of their own to wear ; anxious to get their 
eightpence a day, but not anxious to work or submit 
to discipline. 'Twas astonishing how steady and how 
spirited they showed themselves when once they had 
shaken their lethargy off and were on the march or face 
to face with the enemy. A body of backwoodsmen 
had been hurried forward in February, ere spring had 
opened, to make a clearing and set to work upon a fort 
at the forks of the Ohio ; but it was the 2d of April be- 
fore men enough could be collected at Alexandria to be- 
gin the main movement towards the frontier, and by 
that time it was too late to checkmate the French. The 
little force sent forward to begin fortifications had set 
about their task very sluggishly and without skill, and 
their commander had turned back again with some of 
his men to rejoin the forces behind him before the petty 
works he should have stayed to finish were well begun. 
When, therefore, on the 17th of April, the river sudden- 
ly filled with canoes bearing an army of more than five 
hundred Frenchmen, who put cannon ashore, and sum- 
moned the forty men who held the place to surrender 
or be blown into the water, there was no choice but to 
comply. The young ensign who commanded the little 
garrison urged a truce till he could communicate with 
his superiors, but the French commander would brook 



72 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

no delay. The boy might either take his men off free 
and unhurt, or else fight and face sheer destruction ; and 
the nearest succor was a little force of one hundred and 
fifty men under Colonel Washington, who had not yet 
topped the Alleghanies in their painful work of cutting 
a way through the forests for their field -pieces and 
wagons. 

The Governor's plans had been altered by the Assem- 
bly's vote of money and the additional levy of men 
which it made possible. Colonel Joshua Fry, whom 
Dinwiddie deemed " a man of good sense, and one of 
our best mathematicians," had been given the command 
in chief, and Washington had been named his second in 
command, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. " Dear 
George," wrote Mr. Corbin, of the Governor's Council, 
" I enclose you your commission. God prosper you 
with it !" and the brunt of the work in fact fell upon the 
younger man. But three hundred volunteers could be 
gotten together ; and, all too late, half of the raw levy 
were sent forward under Washington to find or make a 
way for wagons and ordnance to the Ohio. The last 
days of May were almost at hand before they had 
crossed the main ridge of the Alleghanies, so inexperi- 
enced were they in the rough labor of cutting a road 
through the close-set growth and over the sharp slopes 
of the mountains, and so ill equipped ; and by that time 
it was already too late by a full month and more to 
forestall the French, who had only to follow the open 
highway of the Alleghany to bring what force they 
would to the key of the West at the forks of the Ohio. 
As the spring advanced, the French force upon the river 
grew from five to fourteen hundred men, and work w T as 
pushed rapidly forward upon fortifications such as the 



COLONEL WASHINGTON 73 

little band of Englishmen they had ousted had not 
thought of attempting — a veritable fort, albeit of a rude 
frontier pattern, which its builders called Duquesne, in 
honor of their Governor. Washington could hit upon 
no watercourse that would afford him quick transport; 
'twould have been folly, besides, to take his handful of 
ragged provincials into the presence of an intrenched 
army. He was fain to go into camp at Great Meadows, 
just across the ridge of the mountains, and there await 
his Colonel with supplies and an additional handful of 
men. 

It was " a charming field for an encounter," the young 
commander thought, but it was to be hoped the enemy 
would not find their way to it in too great numbers. 
An " Independent Company " of provincials in the 
King's pay joined him out of South Carolina, whence 
they had been sent forward by express orders from 
England ; and the rest of the Virginia volunteers at last 
came up to join their comrades at the Meadows — with- 
out good Colonel Fry, the doughty mathematician, who 
had sickened and died on the way — so that there were 
presently more than three hundred men at the camp, 
and Washington was now their commander-in-chief. 
The officers of the Independent Company from South 
Carolina, holding their commissions from the King, 
would not, indeed, take their orders from Washington, 
with his colonial commission merely ; and, what was 
worse, their men would not work ; but there was no 
doubt they would fight with proper dignity and spirit 
for his Majesty, their royal master. The first blood had 
already been drawn, on the 28th of May, before rein- 
forcements had arrived, when Washington had but just 
come to camp. Upon the morning of that day Wash- 



74 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

ington, with forty men, guided by friendly Indians, had 
come upon a party of some thirty Frenchmen where 
they lurked deep within the thickets of the dripping 
forest, and, with thrust of bayonet when the wet guns 
failed, had brought them to a surrender within fifteen 
minutes of the first surprise. No one in the Virginian 
camp doubted that there was war already, or dreamed 
of awaiting the action of diplomats and cabinets over 
sea. The French had driven an English garrison from 
the forks of the Ohio with threats of force, which would 
certainly have been executed had there been need. 
These men hidden in the thickets at Great Meadows 
would have it, when the fight was over, that they had 
come as messengers merely to bear a peaceful summons ; 
but did it need thirty odd armed men to bear a mes- 
sage ? Why had they lurked for five days so stealthily 
in the forest ; and why had they sent runners back post- 
haste to Fort Duquesne to obtain support for their 
diplomacy 1 Washington might regret that young M. 
Jumonville, their commander, had lost his life in the 
encounter, but he had no doubt he had done right to 
order his men to fire when he saw the French spring 
for their arms at the first surprise. 

Now, at any rate, Avar was unquestionably begun. 
That sudden volley fired in the wet woods at the heart 
of the lonely Alleghanies had set the final struggle 
ablaze. It was now either French or English in Amer- 
ica: it could no longer be both. Jumonville with his 
thirty Frenchmen was followed ere many weeks were 
out by Coulon de Villiers with seven hundred — some of 
them come all the way from Montreal at news of what 
had happened to France's lurking ambassadors in the 
far - away mountains of Virginia. On the 3d of July 



COLONEL WASHINGTON 75 

they closed to an encounter at " Fort Necessity," Wash- 
ington's rude intrenchments upon the Great Meadows. 
There were three hundred and fifty Englishmen with 
him able to fight, spite of sickness and short rations ; 
and as the enemy began to show themselves at the edges 
of the neighboring woods through the damp mists of 
that dreary morning, Washington drew his little force 
up outside their works upon the open meadow. He 
"thought the French would come up to him in open 
field," laughed a wily Indian, who gave him counsel 
freely, but no aid in the fight ; but Yilliers had no mind 
to meet the gallant young Virginian in that manly 
fashion. Once, indeed, they rushed to his trenches, but, 
finding hot reception there, kept their distance after- 
wards. Yilliers brought them after that only " as near 
as possible without uselessly exposing the lives of the 
King's subjects," and poured his fire in from the cover 
of the woods. For nine hours the unequal fight dragged 
on, the French and their Indians hardly showing them- 
selves outside the shelter of the forest, the English 
crouching knee -deep in water in their rude trenches, 
while the rain poured incessantly, reducing their breast- 
works to a mass of slimy mud, and filling all the air 
with a chill and pallid mist. Day insensibly darkened 
into night in such an air, and it was eight o'clock when 
the firing ceased and the French asked a parley. Their 
men were tired of the dreary fight, their Indian allies 
threatened to leave them when morning should come, 
and they were willing the English should withdraw, if 
they would, without further hurt or molestation. The 
terms they offered seemed very acceptable to Washing- 
ton's officers as the interpreter read them out, standing 
there in the drenching downpour and the black night. 



76 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

" It rained so hard we could hardly keep the candle 
lighted to read them by," said an officer ; but there was 
really no choice what to do. More than fifty men lay 
dead or wounded in the flooded camp ; the ammunition 
was all but spent ; the French strength had hardly been 
touched in the fight, and might at any moment be in- 
creased. Capitulation was inevitable, and Washington 
did not hesitate. 

The next morning saw his wretched force making 
their way back again along the rude road they had cut 
through the forests. They had neither horses nor wagons 
to carry their baggage. What they could they burned ; 
and then set out, sore stricken in heart and body, their 
wounded comrades and their scant store of food slung 
upon their backs, and dragged themselves very wearily 
all the fifty miles to the settlements at home. Two of 
the King's Independent Companies from New York 
ought to have joined them long ago, but had gotten no 
farther than Alexandria when the fatal day came at the 
Great Meadows. North Carolina had despatched three 
hundred and fifty of her militiamen, under an experi- 
enced officer, to aid them, but they also came too late. 
It had been expected that Maryland would raise two 
hundred and fifty men, and Pennsylvania had at last 
voted money, to be spent instead of blood, for she would 
levy no men ; but no succor had come from any quarter 
when it should. The English were driven in, and all 
their plans were worse than undone. 

It was a bitter trial for the young Virginian com- 
mander to have his first campaign end so disastrously — 
to be worsted in a petty fight, and driven back hope- 
lessly outdone. No one he cared for in Virginia blamed 
him. His ragged troops had borne themselves like men 




WASHINGTON S RETREAT FROM GREAT MEADOWS 



COLONEL WASHINGTON 77 

in the fight; his own gallantry no man could doubt. 
The House of Burgesses thanked him and voted money 
to his men. But it had been a rough apprenticeship, and 
Washington felt to the quick the lessons it had taught 
him. The discouraging work of recruiting at Alexan- 
dria, the ragged idlers to be governed there, the fruit- 
less drilling of listless and insolent men, the two months' 
work with axe and spade cutting a way through the 
forests, the whole disheartening work of making ready 
for the fight, of seeking the enemy, and of choosing a 
field of encounter, he had borne as a stalwart young 
man can while his digestion holds good. He had at 
least himself clone everything that was possible, and it 
had been no small relief to him to write plain-spoken 
letters to the men who were supposed to be helping him 
in Williamsburg, telling them exactly how things were 
going and who was to blame — letters which showed 
both how efficient and how proud he was. He had 
even shown a sort of boyish zest in the affair when it 
came to actual fighting with Jumonville and his scouts 
hidden in the forest. He had pressed to the thick of 
that hot and sudden skirmish, and had taken the French 
volleys with a lad's relish of the danger. " I heard the 
bullets whistle," he wrote his brother, " and believe me 
there is something charming in the sound." But after 
he had stood a day in the flooded trenches of his wretched 
" fort " at Great Meadows, and fought till evening in 
the open with an enemy he could not see, he knew that 
he had been taught a lesson ; that he was very young 
at this terrible business of fighting; and that something 
more must be learned than could be read in the books 
at Mount Yernon. He kept a cheerful front in the 
dreary retreat, heartening his men bravely by word and 



78 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

example of steadfastness ; but it was a sore blow to his 
pride and his hopes, and he must only have winced 
without protest could he have heard how Horace Wal- 
pole called him a " brave braggart" for his rodomontade 
about the music of deadly missiles. 

He had no thought, however, of quitting his duty be- 
cause his first campaign had miscarried. When he had 
made his report at Williamsburg he rejoined his demor- 
alized regiment at Alexandria, where it lay but an hour's 
ride from Mount Yernon, and set about executing his 
orders to recruit once more, as if the business were only 
just begun. Captain Innes, who had brought three hun- 
dred and fifty men from North Carolina too late to be 
of assistance at the Meadows, and who had had the cha- 
grin of seeing them take themselves off home again be- 
cause there was no money forthcoming to pay them what 
had been promised, remained at Will's Creek, amidst 
the back settlements, to command the King's provincials 
from South Caroling who had been with Washington at 
the Meadows, and the two Independent Companies from 
New York, who had lingered so long on the way; and to 
build there a rough fortification, to be named Fort Cum- 
berland, in honor of the far-away Duke who was com- 
mander-in-chief in England. Dinwiddie, having such 
hot Scots blood in him as could brook no delays, and 
having been bred no soldier or frontiersman, but a mer- 
chant and man of business, would have had Washing- 
ton's recruiting despatched at once, like a bill of goods, 
and a new force sent hot-foot to the Ohio again to catch 
the French while they were at ease over their victory and 
slackly upon their guard at Duquesne. When he was 
flatly told it was impossible, he turned to other plans, 
equally ill considered, though no doubt equally well 



COLONEL WASHINGTON 79 

meant. By October he had obtained of the Assembly 
twenty thousand pounds, and from the government at 
home ten thousand more in good specie, such as was 
scarce in the colony — for the sharp stir of actual fight- 
ing had had its effect alike upon King and Burgesses — 
and had ordered the formation and equipment of ten 
full companies for the frontier. But the new orders 
contained a sad civilian blunder. The ten companies 
should all be Independent Companies ; there should be 
no officer higher than a captain amongst them. This, 
the £ood Scotsman thought, would accommodate all dis- 
putes about rank and precedence, such as had come near 
to making trouble between Washington and Captain 
Mackay, of the Independent Company from South Caro- 
lina, while they waited for the French at Great Meadows. 
Washington at once resigned, indignant to be so dealt 
with. Not only would he be reduced to a captaincy un- 
der such an arrangement, but every pett}^ officer would 
outrank him who could show the King's commission. 
It was no tradition of his class to submit to degradation 
of rank thus by indirection and without fault committed, 
and his pride and sense of personal dignity, for all he 
was so young, were as high-strung as any man's in Vir- 
ginia. He had shown his quality in such matters already, 
six months ago, while he lay in camp in the wilderness on 
his way towards the Ohio. The Burgesses had appoint- 
ed a committee of their own to spend the money they 
had voted to put his expedition afoot in the spring, lest 
Dinwiddie should think, were they to give him the spend- 
ing of it, that they had relented in the matter of the fees ; 
and these gentlemen, in their careful parsimony, had cut 
the officers of the already straitened little force down to 
such pay and food as Washington deemed unworthy a 



80 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

gentleman's acceptance. He would not resign his com- 
mission there at the head of his men upon the march, but 
he asked to be considered a volunteer without pay, that 
he might be quit of the humiliation of being stinted like 
a beggar. Now that it was autumn, however, and wars 
stood still, he could resign without reproach, and he did 
so very promptly, in spite of protests and earnest solici- 
tations from many quarters. " I am concerned to find 
Colonel Washington's conduct so imprudent," wrote 
Thomas Penn. But the high-spirited young officer 
deemed it no imprudence to insist upon a just considera- 
tion of his rank and services, and quietly withdrew to 
Mount Vernon, to go thence to his mother at the "ferry 
farm" upon the Rappahannock, and see again all the 
fields and friends he loved so well. 

It was a very brief respite. He had been scarcely five 
months out of harness when he found himself again in 
camp, his plans and hopes once more turned towards 
the far wilderness where the French lay. He had set a 
great war ablaze that day he led his forty men into the 
thicket and bade them fire upon M. Jumonville and his 
scouts lurking there ; and he could not, loving the deep 
business as he did, keep himself aloof from it when he 
saw how it was to be finished. Horace Walpole might 
laugh lightly at the affair, but French and English states- 
men alike — even Newcastle, England's Prime-Minister, 
as busy about nothing as an old woman, and as thorough- 
ly ignorant of affairs as a young man — knew that some- 
thing must be done, politics hanging at so doubtful a bal- 
ance between them, now that Frederick of Prussia had 
driven France, Austria, and Russia into league against 
him. The French Minister in London and the British 
Minister in Paris vowed their governments still loved 



COLONEL WASHINGTON 81 

and trusted one another, and there was no declaration of 
war. But in the spring of 1755 eighteen French ships 
of war put to sea from Brest and Rochefort, carrying six 
battalions and a new Governor to Canada, and as many 
ships got away under press of sail from English ports to 
intercept and destroy them. Transports carrying two 
English regiments had sailed for Virginia in Januar}', 
and by the 20th of February had reached the Chesa- 
peake. The French ships got safely in at the St. Law- 
rence despite pursuit, losing but two of their fleet, 
which had the ill luck to be found by the English 
befogged and bewildered off the coast. The colonies 
were to see fighting on a new scale. 

The English ministers, with whom just then all things 
went either by favor or by accident, had made a sorry 
blunder in the choice of a commander. Major-General 
Edward Braddock, whom they had commissioned to take 
the two regiments out and act as commander-in-chief in 
America, was a brave man, a veteran soldier, bred in a 
thorough school of action, a man quick with energy and 
indomitable in resolution ; but every quality he had un- 
fitted him to learn. Self-confident, brutal, headstrong, 
" a very Iroquois in disposition," he would take neither 
check nor suggestion. But energy, resolution, good 
soldiers, and a proper equipment might of themselves 
suffice to do much in the crisis that had come, whether 
wisdom held the reins or not ; and it gave the Old Do- 
minion a thrill of quickened hope and purpose to see 
Keppel's transports in the Potomac and Braddock's red- 
coats ashore at Alexandria. 

The transports, as they made their way slowly up the 
river, passed beneath the very windows of Mount Ver- 
non, to put the troops ashore only eight miles beyond. 



82 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

Washington had left off being soldier for Dinwiddie, but 
he had resigned only to avoid an intolerable indignity, 
not to shun service, and he made no pretence of indiffer- 
ence when he saw the redcoats come to camp at Alex- 
andria. Again and again was he early in the saddle to 
see the stir and order of the troops, make the acquaint- 
ance of the officers, and learn, if he might, what it was 
that fitted his Majesty's regulars for their stern business. 
The self-confident gentlemen who wore his Majesty's 
uniform and carried his Majesty's commissions in their 
pockets had scant regard, most of them, for the raw folk 
of the colony, who had never been in London or seen 
the set array of battle. They were not a little impatient 
that they must recruit among such a people. The trans- 
ports had brought but a thousand men — two half-regi- 
ments of five hundred each, whose colonels had instruc- 
tions to add two hundred men apiece to their force in 
the colony. Six companies of " rangers," too, the colo- 
nists were to furnish, and one company of light horse, 
besides carpenters and teamsters. By all these General 
Braddock's officers set small store, deeming it likely they 
must depend, not upon the provincials, but upon them- 
selves for success. They were at small pains to conceal 
their hearty contempt for the people they had come to 
help. 

But with. Washington it was a different matter. 
There was that in his proud eyes and gentleman's bear- 
ing that marked him a man to be made friends with and 
respected. A good comrade he proved, without pre- 
tence or bravado, but an ill man to scorn, as he went 
his way among them, lithe and alert, full six feet in his 
boots, with that strong gait as of a backwoodsman, and 
that haughty carriage as of a man born to have his will. 



COLONEL WASHINGTON 83 

He won their liking, and even their admiration, as a fel- 
low of their own pride and purpose. General Braddock, 
knowing he desired to make the campaign if he might 
do so without sacrifice of self-respect, promptly invited 
him to go as a member of his staff, where there could 
be no question of rank, asking him, besides, to name any 
young gentlemen of. his acquaintance he chose for sev- 
eral vacant ensigncies in the two regiments. The letter 
of invitation, written by Captain Or me, aide-de-camp, 
was couched in terms of unaffected cordiality. Wash- 
ington very gladly accepted, in a letter that had just a 
touch of the young provincial in it, so elaborate and 
over-long was its explanation of its writer's delicate po- 
sition and self-respecting motives, but with so much 
more of the proud gentleman and resolute man that the 
smile with which Captain Orme must have read it could 
have nothing of disrelish in it. The young aide-de-camp 
and all the other members of the General's military 
" family " found its author, at any rate, a man after 
their own hearts when it came to terms of intimacy 
among them. 

By mid- April the commander-in-chief had brought 
five Governors together at Alexandria, in obedience to 
his call for an immediate conference — William Shirley, 
of Massachusetts, the stout-hearted old lawyer, every 
inch "a gentleman and politician," who had of a sudden 
turned soldier to face the French, for all he was past 
sixty ; James De Lancey, of New York, astute man of 
the people ; the brave and energetic Horatio Sharpe, of 
Maryland ; Robert Hunter Morris, fresh from the latest 
wrangles with the headstrong Quakers and Germans of 
Pennsylvania; and Robert Dinwiddie, the busy mer- 
chant Governor of the Old Dominion, whose urgent let- 



84 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

ters to the government at home had brought Braddock 
and his regiments to the Potomac. Plans were prompt- 
ly agreed upon. New York and New England, seeing 
war come on apace, were astir no less than Virginia, 
and in active correspondence with the ministers in Lon- 
don. Two regiments had already been raised and taken 
into the King's pay ; the militia of all the threatened 
colonies were afoot ; in all quarters action was expected 
and instant war. Governor Shirley, the council agreed, 
should strike at once at Niagara with the King's new 
provincial regiments, in the hope to cut the enemy's 
connections with their western posts ; Colonel William 
Johnson, the cool-headed trader and borderer, who had 
lived and thriven so long in the forests where the dread- 
ed Mohawks had their strength, should lead a levy from 
New England, New York, and New Jersey to an attack 
upon Crown Point, where for twenty -four years the 
French had held Champlain ; and Lieutenant - Colonel 
Monckton, of the King's regulars, must take a similar 
force against Beausejour in Acadia, while General Brad- 
dock struck straight into the western wilderness to take 
Duquesne. 'Twere best to be prompt in every part of 
the hazardous business, and Braddock turned from the 
conference to push his own expedition forward at once. 
" After taking Fort Duquesne," he said to Franklin,- " I 
am to proceed to Niagara ; and after having taken that, 
to Frontenac, if the season will allow time ; and I sup- 
pose it will, for Duquesne can hardly detain me above 
three or four days ; and then I can see nothing that can 
obstruct my march to Niagara." " To be sure, sir," qui- 
etly replied the sagacious Franklin ; " if you arrive well 
before Duquesne with these fine troops, so well provided 
with artillery, the fort . . . can probably make but a 



COLONEL WASHINGTON 85 

short resistance." But there was the trouble. 'Twould 
have been better, no doubt, had a route through Penn- 
sylvania been chosen, where cultivated farms already 
stretched well into the West, with their own roads and 
grain and cattle and wagons to serve an army with ; but 
the Virginia route had been selected (by intrigue of gen- 
tlemen interested in the Ohio Company, it was hinted), 
and must needs be made the best of. There was there, 
at the least, the rough track Washington's men had cut 
to the Great Meadows. This must be widened and lev- 
elled for an army with its cumbrous train of artillery, 
and its endless procession of wagons laden with baggage 
and provisions. To take two thousand men through 
the dense forests with all the military trappings and 
supplies of a European army would be to put, it might 
be, four miles of its rough trail between van and rear of 
the struggling line, and it would be a clumsy enemy, as 
fighting went in the woods, who could not cut such a 
force into pieces — " like thread," as Franklin said. 

The thing was to be attempted, nevertheless, with 
stubborn British resolution. It was the 19th of May 
before all the forces intended for the march were finally 
collected at Fort Cumberland, twenty-two hundred men 
in all — fourteen hundred regulars, now the recruits were 
in ; nearly five hundred Virginians, horse and foot ; two 
Independent Companies from New York ; and a small 
force of sailors from the transports to rig tackle for the 
ordnance when there was need on the rough way. And 
it was the 10th of June when the advance began, 
straight into that " realm of forests ancient as the 
world" that lay without limit upon all the western 
ways. It was a thing of infinite difficulty to get that 
lumbering train through the tangled wilderness, and it 



86 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

kept the temper of the truculent Bracldock very hot to 
see how it played havoc with every principle and prac- 
tice of campaigning he had ever heard of. He charged 
the colonists with an utter want alike of honor and of 
honesty to have kept him so long awaiting the transpor- 
tation and supplies they had promised, and to have done 
so little to end with, and so drew Washington into 
"frequent disputes, maintained with warmth on both 
sides " ; but the difficulties of the march presently 
wrought a certain forest change upon him, and disposed 
him to take counsel of his young Virginian aide— the 
only man in all his company who could speak out of 
knowledge in that wild country. On the 19th, at 
Washington's advice, he took twelve hundred men and 
pressed forward with a lightened train to a quicker ad- 
vance, leaving Colonel Dunbar to bring up the rest of 
the troops with the baggage. Even this lightened force 
halted " to level every mole-hill, and to erect bridges over 
every brook," as Washington chafed to see, and " were 
four days in getting twelve miles"; but the pace was 
better than before, and brought them at last almost to 
their destination. 

On the 9th of July, at mid- day, they waded the 
shallow Monongahela, but eight miles from Duquesne, 
making a brave show as the sun struck upon their 
serried ranks, their bright uniforms, their fluttering 
banners, and their glittering arms, and went straight 
into the rough and shadowed forest path that led to the 
French post. Upon a sudden there came a man bound- 
ing along the path to meet them, wearing the gorget of 
a French officer, and the forest behind him swarmed 
with a great host of but half-discovered men. Upon 
signal given, these spread themselves to the right and 



COLONEL WASHINGTON 87 

left within the shelter of the forest, and from their cov- 
ert poured a deadly fire upon Braddock's advancing 
lines. With good British pluck the steady regulars 
formed their accustomed ranks, crying, " God save the 
King!" to give grace to the volleys they sent back into 
the forest ; the ordnance was brought up and swung to 
its work ; all the force pressed forward to take what 
place it could in the fight ; but where was the use ? 
Washington besought General Braddock to scatter his 
men too, and meet the enemy under cover as they came, 
but he would not listen. They must stand in ranks, as 
they were bidden, and take the fire of their hidden foes 
like men, without breach of discipline. When they 
would have broken in spite of him, in their panic at 
being slaughtered there in the open glade without sight 
of the enemy, Braddock beat them back with his sword, 
and bitterly cursed them for cowards. He would have 
kept the Virginians, too, back from the covert if he 
could, when he saw them seek to close with the attack- 
ing party in true forest fashion. As it was, they were 
as often shot down by the terror-stricken regulars be- 
hind them as by their right foes in front. They alone 
made any head in the fight ; but who could tell in such 
a place how the battle fared? No one could count 
the enemy where they sprang from covert to covert. 
They were, in fact, near a thousand strong at the first 
meeting in the way — more than six hundred Indians, a 
motley host gathered from far and near at the summons 
of the French, sevenscore Canadian rangers, seventy odd 
regulars from the fort, and thirty or forty French offi- 
cers, come out of sheer eagerness to have a hand in the 
daring game. Contrecoeur could not spare more French- 
men from his little garrison, his connections at the lakes 



88 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

being threatened, and he sorely straitened for men and 
stores. lie was staking everything, as it was, upon this 
encounter on the way. If the English should shake the 
savages off, as he deemed they would, he must no doubt 
withdraw as he could ere the lines of siege were closed 
about him. He never dreamed of such largess of good 
fortune as came pouring in upon him. The English 
were not only checked, but beaten. They had never 
seen business like this. 'Twas a pitiful, shameful 
slaughter — men shot like beasts in a pen there where 
they cowered close in their scarlet ranks. Their first 
blazing volleys had sent the craven Canadians scamper- 
ing back the way they had come ; Beaujeu, who led the 
attack, was killed almost at the first onset ; but the gal- 
lant youngsters who led the motley array wavered never 
an instant, and readily held the Indians to their easy 
work. Washington did all that furious energy and reck- 
less courage could to keep the order of battle his com- 
mander had so madly chosen, to hold the regulars to 
their blind work and hearten the Virginians to stay the 
threatened rout, driving his horse everywhere into the 
thick of the murderous firing, and crying upon all alike 
to keep to it steadily like men. He had but yesterday 
rejoined the advance, having for almost two weeks lain 
stricken with a fever in Dunbar's camp. He could 
hardly sit his cushioned saddle for weakness when the 
fight began ; but when the blaze of the battle burst, his 
eagerness was suddenly like that of one possessed, and 
his immunity from harm like that of one charmed. 
Thrice a horse was shot under him, many bullets cut his 
clothing, but he went without a wound. A like mad 
energy drove Braddock storming up and down the 
breaking lines; but he was mortally stricken at last, 



COLONEL WASHINGTON 89 

and Washington alone remained to exercise such control 
as was possible when the inevitable rout came. 

It was impossible to hold the ground in such fashion. 
The stubborn Braddock himself had ordered a retreat 
ere the fatal bullet found him. Sixty-three out of the 
eighty-six officers of his force were killed or disabled ; 
less than five hundred men out of all the thirteen hun- 
dred who had but just now passed so gallantly through 
the ford remained unhurt ; the deadly slaughter must 
have gone on to utter destruction. Ketreat was inevita- 
ble — 'twas blessed good fortune that it was still possi- 
ble. When once it began it was headlong, reckless, 
frenzied. The men ran wildly, blindly, as if hunted by 
demons whom no man might hope to resist — haunted 
by the frightful cries, maddened by the searching and 
secret fire of their foes, now coming hot upon their 
heels. Wounded comrades, military stores, baggage, 
their very arms, they left upon the ground, abandoned. 
Far into the night they ran madly on, in frantic search 
for the camp of the rear division, crying, as they ran, 
for help; they even passed the camp, in their uncontrol- 
lable terror of pursuit, and went desperately on towards 
the settlements. Washington and the few officers and 
provincials who scorned the terror found the utmost 
difficulty in bringing off their stricken General, where 
he lay wishing to die. Upon the fourth day after the 
battle he died, loathing the sight of a redcoat, they said, 
and murmuring praises of " the blues," the once despised 
Virginians. They buried his body in the road, that the 
army wagons might pass over the place and obliterate 
every trace of a grave their savage enemies might re- 
joice to find and desecrate. 

He had lived to reach Dunbar's camp, but not to see 



90 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

the end of the shameful rout. The terror mastered the 
rear-guard too. They destroyed their artillery, burned 
their wagons and stores, emptied their powder into the 
streams, and themselves broke into a disordered, fever- 
ish retreat which was a mere flight, their craven com- 
mander shamefully acquiescing. He would not even 
hold or rally them at Fort Cumberland, but went on, 
as if upon a hurried errand, all the way to Philadel- 
phia, leaving the fort, and all the frontier with it, 
"to be defended by invalids and a few Virginians." 
u I acknowledge," cried Dinwiddie, " I was not brought 
up to arms; but I think common -sense would have 
prevailed not to leave the frontier exposed after hav- 
ing opened a road over the mountains to the Ohio, 
by which the enemy can the more easily invade us. 
The whole conduct of Colonel Dunbar seems to be 
monstrous." And so, indeed, it was. But the colonies 
at large had little time to think of it. Governor Shir- 
ley had gone against Niagara only to find the French 
ready for him at every point, now that they had read 
Braddock's papers, taken at Duquesne, and to come back 
again without doing anything. Beausejour had been 
taken in Acadia, but it lay apart from the main field of 
struggle. Johnson beat the French off at Lake George 
when they attacked him, and took Dieskau, their com- 
mander ; but he contented himself with that, and left 
Crown Point untouched. There were other frontiers 
besides those of Virginia and Pennsylvania to be looked 
to and guarded. For three long years did the fortunes 
of the English settlements go steadily from danger to 
desperation, as the French and their savage allies ad- 
vanced from victory to victory. In 1756 Oswego was 
taken ; in 1757, Fort William Henry. Commander sue- 



COLONEL WASHINGTON 91 

ceedecl commander among the English, only to add blun- 
der to blunder, failure to failure. And all the while it 
fell to Washington, Virginia's chief stay in her desperate 
trouble, to stand steadfastly to the hopeless work of 
keeping three hundred and fifty miles of frontier with 
a few hundred men against prowling bands of sav- 
ages, masters of the craft of swift and secret attack, 
" dexterous at skulking," in a country " mountainous 
and full of swamps and hollow ways covered with 
woods." 

For twenty years now settlers had been coming 
steadily into this wilderness that lay up and down upon 
the nearer slopes of the great mountains — Germans, 
Scots-Irish, a hardy breed. Their settlements lay scat- 
tered far and near among the foot-hills and valleys. 
Their men were valiant and stout-hearted, quick with 
the rifle, hard as flint when they were once afoot to re- 
venge themselves for murdered wives and children and 
comrades. But how could they, scattered as they were, 
meet these covert sallies in the dead of night — a sudden 
rush of men with torches, the keen knife, the quick rifle? 
The country filled with fugitives, for whom Washing- 
ton's militiamen could find neither food nor shelter. 
" The supplicating tears of the women, and moving pe- 
titions of the men," cried the young commander, " melt 
me into such deadly sorrow that I solemnly declare, if 
I know my own mind, I could offer myself a willing 
sacrifice to the butchering enemy, provided that would 
contribute to the people's ease. ... I would be a will- 
ing offering to savage fury, and die by inches to save a 
people." It was a comfort to know, at the least, that 
he was trusted and believed in. The Burgesses had 
thanked him under the very stroke of Braddock's defeat, 



92 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

in terms which could not be doubted sincere. In the 
very thick of his deep troubles, when he would have 
guarded the helpless people of the border, but could not, 
Colonel Fairfax could send him word from Williams- 
burg, " Your good health and fortune are the toast at 
every table." " Our Colonel," wrote a young comrade 
in arms, "is an example of fortitude in either danger or 
hardships, and by his easy, polite behavior has gained 
not only the regard but affection of both officers and 
soldiers." But it took all the steadiness that had been 
born or bred in him to endure the strain of the dis- 
heartening task, from which he could not in honor 
break away. His plans, he complained, were " to-da\ T 
approved, to-morrow condemned." He was bidden do 
what was impossible. It would require fewer men to 
go against Duquesne again and remove the cause of 
danger than to prevent the effects while the cause re- 
mained. Many of his officers were careless and ineffi- 
cient, many of his men mutinous. " Your Honor will, 
I hope, excuse my hanging instead of shooting them," 
he wrote to the Governor; "it conveyed much more 
terror to others, and it was for example' sake that we 
did it." It was a test as of lire for a young colonel in 
his twenties. 

But a single light lies upon the picture. Early in 
1756, ere the summer's terror had come upon the bor- 
der, and while he could be spared, he took horse and 
made his way to Boston to see Governor Shirley, now 
acting as commander-in-chief in the colonies, and from 
him at first hand obtain settlement of that teasing ques- 
tion of rank that had already driven the young officer 
once from the service. He went very bravely dight in 
proper uniform of buff and blue, a white -and -scarlet 




'/ 




WASHINGTON AND MARY PHILTPSK 



COLONEL WASHINGTON 93 

cloak upon his shoulders, the sword at his side knotted 
with red and gold, his horse's fittings engraved with the 
Washington arms, and trimmed in the best style of the 
London saddlers. With him rode two aides in their 
uniforms, and two servants in their white -and -scarlet 
livery. Curious folk who looked upon the celebrated 
young officer upon the road saw him fare upon his way 
with all the pride of a Virginian gentleman, a hand- 
some man, and an admirable horseman — a very gallant 
figure, no one could deny. Everywhere he was feted 
as he went ; everywhere he showed himself the earnest, 
high-strung, achieving youth he was. In New York he 
fell into a new ambush, from which he did not come off 
without a wound. His friend Beverly Robinson must 
needs have Miss Mary Philipse at his house there, a 
beauty and an heiress, and Washington came away 
from her with a sharp rigor at his heart. But he could 
not leave that desolate frontier at home unprotected to 
stay for a siege upon a lady's heart ; he had recovered 
from such wounds before, had before that left pleasure 
for duty; and in proper season was back at his post, 
with papers from Shirley which left no doubt who 
should command in Virginia. 

At last, in 1758, the end came, when William Pitt 
thrust smaller men aside and became Prime-Minister in 
England. Amherst took Louisbourg, Wolfe came to 
Quebec, and General Forbes, that stout and steady sol- 
dier, was sent to Virginia to go again against Duquesne. 
The advance was slow to exasperation in the view of 
every ardent man like Washington, and cautious almost 
to timidity ; but the very delay redounded to its success 
at last. 'Twas November before Duquesne was reached. 
The Indians gathered there, seeing winter come on, had 



94 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

not waited to meet them ; and the French by that time 
knew themselves in danger of being cut off by the Eng- 
lish operations in the North. When Forbes's forces, 
therefore, at last entered those fatal woods again, where 
Braddock's slaughtered men had lain to rot, the French 
had withdrawn ; nothing remained but to enter the 
smoking ruins of their abandoned fort, hoist the King's 
flag, and re-name the post Fort Pitt ; and Washington 
turned homeward again to seek the rest he so much 
needed. It had been almost a bloodless campaign, but 
such danger as it had brought Washington had shared 
to the utmost. The French had not taken themselves 
off without at least one trial of the English strength. 
While yet Forbes lay within the mountains a large de- 
tachment had come from Duquesne to test and recon- 
noitre his force. Colonel Mercer, of the Virginian line, 
had been ordered forward with a party to meet them. 
He stayed so long, and the noise of the firing came 
back with so doubtful a meaning to the anxious ears at 
the camp, that Washington hastened with volunteers to 
his relief. In the dusk the two bodies of Englishmen 
met, mistook each other for enemies, exchanged a dead- 
ly fire, and were checked only because Washington, 
rushing between their lines, even while their pieces 
blazed, cried his hot commands to stop, and struck up 
the smoking muzzles with his sword. 'Twas through 
no prudence of his he was not shot. 

For a long time his friends had felt a deep uneasiness 
about his health. They had very earnestly besought 
him not to attempt a new campaign. " You will in all 
probability bring on a relapse," George Mason had 
warned him, " and render yourself incapable of serving 
the public at a time when there may be the utmost oc- 



COLONEL WASHINGTON 



95 



casion. There is nothing more certain than that a <ren- 
tleman of your station owes the care of his health and 
his life not only to himself and his friends, but to his 
country." But he had deemed the nearest duty the 
most imperative ; and it was only after that duty was 
disposed of that he had turned from the field to seek 
home and new pleasures along with new duties. The 
winter brought news from Quebec of the fall of the 
French power in America, which made rest and home 
and pleasure the more grateful and full of zest. 




Taa** 



MOUNT VERNON DAYS 



CHAPTER IV 

On a May clay in 1758, as he spurred upon the way to 
Williamsburg, under orders from the frontier, Washing- 
ton rode straight upon an adventure he had not looked 
for. He was within a few hours' ride of the little capi- 
tal ; old plantations lay close upon the way ; neighborly 
homes began to multiply ; and so striking a horseman, 
riding uniformed and attended, could not thereabouts 
go far unrecognized. He was waylaid and haled to din- 
ner, despite excuses and protests of public business call- 
ing for despatch. There was a charming woman to be 
seen at the house, his friend told him, if a good dinner 
was not argument enough — and his business could not 
spoil for an hour's stay in agreeable company. And so, 
of a sudden, under constraint of Virginian hospitality, 
he was hurried into the presence of the gracious young 
matron who was at once, and as if of right, to make his 
heart safe against further quest or adventure. Martha 
Custis was but six-and-twenty. To the charm of youth 
and beauty were added that touch of quiet sweetness 
and that winning grace of self-possession which come to 
a woman wived in her girlhood, and widowed before 
age or care has checked the first full tide of life. At 
seventeen she had married Daniel Parke Custis, a man 
more than twenty years her senior; but eight years of 
quiet love and duty as wife and mother had only made 



100 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

her youth the more gracious in that rural land of leisure 
and good neighborhood ; and a year's widowhood had 
been but a suitable preparation for perceiving the charm 
of this stately young soldier who now came riding her 
way upon the public business. His age was her own ; 
all the land knew him and loved him for gallantry and 
brave capacity ; he carried himself like a prince — and 
he forgot his errand to linger in her company. Dinner 
was soon over, and his horses at the door ; there was 
the drilled and dutiful Bishop, trained servant that he 
was, leading his restless and impatient charge back and 
forth within sight of the windows and of the terrace 
where his young Colonel tarried, absorbed and forget- 
ful ; man and beast alike had been in the service of the 
unhappy Braddock, and might seem to walk there lively 
memorials of duty done and undertaken. But dusk 
came; the horses were put up; and the next morning 
was well advanced before the abstracted young officer 
got at last to his saddle, and spurred on belated to 
Williamsburg. His business concerned the preparations 
then afoot for General Forbes's advance upon Duquesne. 
" I came here at this critical juncture," said Washington 
to the President of the Council, " by the express order 
of Sir John St. Clair, to represent in the fullest man- 
ner the posture of our affairs at Winchester"— lack 
of clothes, arms, and equipage, lack of money, lack of 
wise regulations touching rank and discipline. General 
Forbes had been in Philadelphia a month already, 
awaiting the formation of his army in Virginia; Sir 
John St. Clair, his quartermaster-general, had come into 
the province to see that proper plans were made and 
executed ; it was necessary that matters should be 
pressed forward very diligently and at once ; and Wash- 




v-< 



Patrick Henry Washington Pendleton 
LEAVING MOUNT VERNON FOR THE CONGRESS OF THE COLONIES 



MOUNT VERNON DAYS 101 

ington, when once at the seat of government, was not 
slack to urge and superintend official action. But, the 
troublesome business once in proper course, he turned 
back to seek Mrs. Custis again, this time at her own 
home, ere he went the long distance of the frontier. 
The onset was made with a soldier's promptness and 
audacity. He returned to his post, after a delay too 
slight to deserve any reasonable man's remark, and yet 
with a pledge given and taken which made him look 
forward to the end of the campaign with a new longing 
as to the winning of a real home and an unwonted hap- 
piness. 

This was not his first adventure in love, but it was his 
last, and gave him a quiet joy which stood him in stead 
a whole lifetime. No young Virginian could live twenty- 
six years amidst fair women in that hale and sociable 
colony without being touched again and again by the 
quick passion ; and this man had the blood of a lover 
beyond his fellows. Despite the shyness of a raw lad 
who lived much in the open, he had relished the com- 
pany of lively women from the first, meeting their gay 
sallies sometimes with a look from his frank blue eyes 
that revealed more than he knew. Love had first found 
him out in earnest six years ago, when he was but just 
turned of twent} r ; and it had taken all the long while 
since to forget his repulse at the hands of a fair young 
beauty in that day of passion. Mary Phillipse had but 
taken his fancy for a moment, because he could not pass 
such a woman by and deem himself still a true Virgin- 
ian. It was more serious that he had been much in the 
company, these last years, of a fair neighbor of the 
vivacious house of Gary, whose wit and beauty had 
haunted him in the very thick of campaigns upon the 



102 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

frontier, and who still mastered his heart now and 
again, with a sort of imperious charm, in the midst of 
this very happy season when he knew Martha Custis 
his veritable heart's mistress for the future. It may 
well have made him glad of misadventures in the past 
to know his heart safe now. 

The campaign dragged painfully, far into the drear au- 
tumn. December had come before the captured post on 
the Ohio could be left to the keeping of Colonel Mercer 
and a little garrison of provincials. But when at last 
he was free again there was no reason why Washington 
should wait longer to be happy, and he was married to 
Martha Custis on the 6th of January, 1759. The sun 
shone very bright that day, and there was the fine glit- 
ter of gold, the brave show of resplendent uniforms, in 
the little church where the marriage was solemnized. 
Officers of his Majesty's service crowded there, in their 
gold lace and scarlet coats, to see their comrade wedded ; 
the new Governor, Francis Fauquier, himself came, clad 
as befitted his rank ; and the bridegroom took the sun 
not less gallantly than the rest, as he rode, in blue and 
silver and scarlet, beside the coach and six that bore his 
bride homeward amidst the throng-in g friends of the 
country-side. The young soldier's love of a gallant 
array and a becoming ceremony was satisfied to the 
full, and he must have rejoiced to be so brave a horse- 
man on such a day. For three months of deep content 
he lived with his bride at her own residence, the White 
House, by York Eiver side, where their troth had been 
plighted, forgetting the fatigues of the frontier, and 
learning gratefully the new life of quiet love and home- 
ly duty. 

These peaceful, healing months gone by, he turned 



MOUNT VERNON DAYS 103 

once more to public business. Six months before his 
marriage he had been chosen a member of the House of 
Burgesses for Frederick County — the county which had 
been his scene of adventure in the old days of surveying 
in the wilderness, and in which ever since Braddock's 
fatal rout he had maintained his headquarters striving 
to keep the border against the savages. Small wonder 
that he led the poll taken there in Winchester, where 
through so many seasons men had seen him bear him- 
self like a capable man and a gallant, indomitable sol- 
dier. 'Twas no unwelcome duty, either, to take his 
young wife to Williamsburg in " the season," when all 
Virginia was in town in the persons of the Burgesses 
and the country gentry come to enjoy the festivities 
and join in the business then sure to be afoot. The 
young soldier was unused to assemblies, however, and 
suffered a keen embarrassment to find himself for a 
space too conspicuous amidst the novel parliamentary 
scene. He had hardly taken his seat when the gracious 
and stately Eobinson, Speaker of the House and Treas- 
urer of the colony these twenty years, rose, at the bid- 
ding of the Burgesses, to thank him for the services of 
which all were speaking. This sudden praise, spoken 
with generous warmth there in a public place, was more 
than Washington knew how to meet. He got to his 
feet w T hen Mr. Speaker was done, but he could not utter 
a syllable. He stood there, instead, hot with blushes, 
stammering, all a- tremble from head to foot. " Sit 
down, Mr. Washington," cried the Speaker; "your 
modesty is equal to your valor, and that surpasses the 
power of any language that I possess." 

Again and again, as the years passed, Washington re- 
turned at each session to Williamsburg to take his place 



104 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

in the Assembly ; and with custom came familiarity and 
the ease and firmness he at first had lacked upon the 
floor. His life broadened about him ; all the uses of 
peace contributed to give him facility and knowledge 
and a wide comradeship in affairs. Along with quiet 
days as a citizen, a neighbor, and a country gentleman, 
came maturity and the wise lessons of a various experi- 
ence. No man in Virginia lived more or with a greater 
zest henceforth than Colonel Washington. His mar- 
riage brought him great increase of wealth, as well as 
increase of responsibility. Mr. Custis had left many 
thousand acres of land, and forty-five thousand pounds 
sterling in money, a substantial fortune to the young 
wife and the two little children who survived him; and 
Washington had become, by special decree of the Gov- 
ernor and Council in General Court, trustee and mana- 
ger of the whole. It needed capacity and knowledge 
and patience of no mean order to get good farming out 
of slaves, and profitable prices out of London merchants ; 
to find prompt and trustworthy ship-masters by whom to 
send out cargoes, and induce correspondents over sea to 
ship the perishable goods sent in return by the right ves- 
sels, bound to the nearest river ; and the bigger your es- 
tate the more difficult its proper conduct and economy, 
the more disastrous in scale the effects of mismanage- 
ment. No doubt the addition of Mrs. Custis's handsome 
property to his own broad and fertile acres at Mount 
Yernon made Colonel Washington one of the wealthiest 
men in Virginia. But Virginian wealth was not to be 
counted till crops were harvested and got to market. The 
current price of tobacco might leave you with or with- 
out a balance to your credit in London, your only clear- 
ing-house, as it chanced. Your principal purchases, too, 



MOUNT VERNON DAYS 105 

must be made over sea and through factors. Both what 
you sold and what you bought must take the hazards of 
the sea voyage, the whims of sea captains, the chances of 
a foreign market. To be farmer and merchant at once, 
manage your own negroes and your own overseers, and 
conduct an international correspondence; to keep the run 
of prices current, duties, port dues, and commissions, and 
know the fluctuating rates of exchange; to understand 
and meet all changes, whether in merchants or in mar- 
kets, three thousand miles away, required an amount of 
information, an alertness, a steady attention to detail, a 
sagacity in farming and a shrewdness in trade, such as 
made a great property a burden to idle or inefficient 
men. But Washington took pains to succeed. He had 
a great zest for business. The practical genius which 
had shone in him almost prematurely as a boy now 
grew heartily in him as a man of fortune. Messrs. 
Robert Cary & Company, his factors in London, must 
soon have learned to recognize his letters, in the mere 
handling, by their bulk. No detail escaped him when 
once he had gotten into the swing of the work. 
They must be as punctilious as he was, they found, in 
seeing to every part of the trade and accounting with 
which he intrusted them, or else look to lose his lucra- 
tive patronage. He was not many years in learning 
how to make the best tobacco in Virginia, and to get it 
recognized as such in England. Barrels of flour marked 
" George Washington, Mount Vernon," were ere long 
suffered to pass the inspectors at the ports of the Brit- 
ish West Indies without scrutiny. It was worth while 
to serve so efficient a man to his satisfaction ; worth 
while or not, he would not be served otherwise. 

He had emerged, as it were, after a tense and troubled 



I OR GEORGE WASHINGTON 

youth, upon a peaceful tract of time, Avhere his powers 
could stretch and form themselves without strain or 
hurry. He had robust health, to which he gave leave 
in unstinted work, athletic strength, and an insatiable 
relish for being much afoot and in the open, which he 
satisfied with early rounds of superintendence in the 
fields where the men were at their tasks, with many a 
tireless ride after the hounds, or steadfast wait at the 
haunts of the deer ; a planning will that craved some 
practical achievement every day, which he indulged by 
finding tasks of betterment about the estate and keep- 
ing his men at them with unflagging discipline; a huge 
capacity for being useful and for understanding bow to 
be so, which he suffered his neighbors, his parish, his 
county, the colony itself, to employ when there was 
need. To a young man, bred these ten years in the for- 
ests and in the struggle of warfare upon a far frontier, 
it had been intolerable to live tamely, without executive 
tasks big and various enough to keep his energy from 
rust. The clerical side of business he had learned very 
thoroughly in camp, as well as the exceeding stir and 
strain of individual effort — the incessant letter writing 
necessary to keep promised performance afoot, the reck- 
oning of men and of stores, the nice calculations of time 
and ways and means ; the scrutiny of individual men, 
too, which is so critical a part of management, and the 
slow organization of effort : he had been in a fine school 
for these things all his youth, and would have thought 
shame to himself not to have learned temperance, sagac- 
ity, thrift, and patience wherewith to use his energy. 
His happy marriage did him the service to keep him 
from restlessness. His love took his allegiance, and 
held him to his home as to a post of honor ancj reward. 



MOUNT VERNON DATS 107 

He had never before had leave to be tender with chil- 
dren, or show with what a devotion he could preside 
over a household all his own. His home got strong 
hold upon him. His estates gave him scope of com- 
mand and a life of action. 'Twas no wonder he kept 
his factors busy, and shipped goods authenticated by the 
brand. 

The soldierly young planter gave those who knew 
him best, as well as those who met him but to pass, the 
impression of a singular restraint and self-command, 
which lent a peculiar dignity and charm to his speech 
and carriage. They deemed him deeply passionate, and 
yet could never remember to have seen him in a pas- 
sion. The impression was often a wholesome check 
upon strangers, and even upon friends and neighbors, 
who would have sought to impose upon him. No doubt 
he had given way to bursts of passion often enough in 
camp and upon the march, when inefficiency, disobedi- 
ence, or cowardice angered him hotly and of a sudden. 
There were stories to be heard of men who had reason 
to remember how terrible he could be in his wrath. 
But he had learned, in the very heat and discipline 
of such scenes, how he must curb and guard himself 
against surprise, and it was no doubt trials of command 
made in his youth that had given him the fine self-poise 
men noted in him now. He had been bred in a strict 
school of manners at Belvoir and Green way Court, and 
here at his own Mount Vernon in the old days, and the 
place must have seemed to him full of the traditions of 
whatsoever was just and honest and lovely and of good 
report as he looked back to the time of his gentle 
brother. It was still dangerous to cross or thwart 
him, indeed. Poachers might look to be caught and 



108 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

soundly thrashed by the master himself if he chanced 
their way. Negligent overseers might expect sharp 
penalties, and unfaithfulcontractors a strict accounting, 
it* necessary work went wrong by their fault. He was 
exacting almost to the point of harshness in every mat- 
ter of just right or authority. But he was open and 
wholesome as the day, and reasonable to the point of 
pity in every affair of humanity, through it all. Now 
it was " my rascally overseer, Harclwick," in his diary, 
when certain mares were sent home " scarce able to 
highlone, much less to assist in the business of the 
plantations"; but not a month later it was " my worthy 
overseer, Hard wick, lying in Winchester of a broken 
leg." It was not in his way to add anything to the 
penalties of nature. 

A quiet simplicity of life and a genuine love of real 
sport rid him of morbid humors. All up and down the 
English world, while the eighteenth century lasted, gen- 
tlemen were commonly to be found drunk after dinner 
— outside New England, where the efficient Puritan 
Church had fastened so singular a discipline in manners 
upon a whole society— and Virginian gentlemen had a 
reputation for deep drinking which they had been at 
some pains to deserve. A rural society craves excite- 
ment, and can get it very simply by such practices. 
There is always leisure to sleep afterwards, even 
though your dinner come in the middle of the day; and 
there is good reason you should be thirsty if you have 
been since daybreak in the saddle. To ride hard and to 
drink hard seemed to go together in Virginia as inevita- 
bly as the rhymes in a song; and 'twas famous hard 
riding after the fox over the rough fields and through 
the dense thickets. If Washington drank only small 



MOUNT VERNON DAYS 109 

beer or cider and a couple of glasses of Madeira at din- 
ner, it was no doubt because he bad found his quick 
blood tonic enough, and had set himself a hard regimen 
as a soldier. He did not scruple to supply drink enough 
for the thirstiest gathering when he presented himself 
to the voters of the country-side as a candidate for the 
House of Burgesses. " A hogshead and a barrel of 
punch, thirty -live gallons of wine, forty -three gallons 
of strong cider, and dinner for his friends,' 1 was what 
he cheerfully paid for at his first election, and the poll 
footed but a few hundred votes all told. Mount Yernon 
saw as much company and as constant merriment and 
good cheer as any house in Virginia; and the master 
was no martinet to his guests, even though they came 
upon professional errands. " Doctor Laurie came here, 
I may add drunk," says his quiet diary, without com- 
ment, though the doctor had come upon summons to at- 
tend Mrs. Washington, and was next morning suffered 
to use his lancet for her relief. No doubt a good fel- 
low when sober, and not to be lightly chidden when 
drunk, like many a gallant horseman and gentleman 
who joined the meet of the country-side at the hospita- 
ble place to follow the hounds when the hunting was 
good. There was foxhunting winter and summer, in 
season and out, but the sport was best in the frosty 
days of January and February, when the year was 
young and the gentlemen of the country round gathered 
at Belvoir or Gunston Hall or Mount Yernon two or 
three times a week to warm their blood in the hale 
sport, and dine together afterwards — a cordial company 
of neighbors, with as many topics of good talk as foxes 
to run to cover. The hunt went fastest and most in- 
cessantly when Lord Fairfax came down from his lodge 



110 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

in the Yalley and joined them for days together in the 
field and at the table. 

Washington loved horses and dogs with the heartiest 
sportsman of them all. He had a great gusto for stalk- 
ing deer with George Mason on the broad forested 
tracts round Gunston Hall, and liked often to take gun 
or rod after lesser game when the days fell dull ; but 
best of all he loved a horse's back, and the hard ride for 
hours together after the dogs and a crafty quarry — a 
horse it put a man to his points to ride, a country 
where the running was only for those who dared. His 
own mounts could nowhere be bettered in Virginia. 
There was full blood of Araby in his noble Magnolia, 
and as good hunting blood as was to be found in the 
colony in his Blueskin and Ajax, Yaliant and Chink- 
ling. His hounds he bred " so flew'd, so sanded," so 
matched in speed and habit, that they kept always tune 
and pace together in the field. " A cry more tuneable 
was never holla' d to, nor cheered with horn," than theirs 
when they were let " spend their mouths " till echo re- 
plied "as if another chase were in the skies." 'Twas 
first to the stables for him always in the morning, and 
then to the kennels. 

It had been hard and anxious work to get his affairs 
into prosperous shape again when the war was over, 
and those long, hopeless summers on the stricken fron- 
tier. Stock, buildings, fences — everything had to be 
renewed, refitted, repaired. For the first two or three 
years there were even provisions to buy, so slow was the 
place to support itself once more. Not only all his own 
ready money, but all he got by his marriage too, and 
more besides, was swallowed up, and he found himself 
in debt before matters were finally set to rights and 



MOUNT VERNON DAYS 111 

profitable crops made and marketed. But, the thing 
once done, affairs cleared and became easy as if of their 
own accord in the business of the estate. The men he 
had to deal with presently knew their master: the 
young planter had matured his plans and his discipline. 
Henceforth his affairs were well in hand, and he could 
take his wholesome pleasures both handsomely and with 
a free heart. There was little that was debonair about 
the disciplined and masterful young soldier. He had 
taken Pallas'sgift : " Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self- 
control, these three alone lead life to sovereign power. 
And because right is right, to follow right were wisdom 
in the scorn of consequence." But he took heed of his 
life very genially, and was matured by pleasure no less 
than by duty done. He loved a game of cards in almost 
any company, and paid his stakes upon the rubber like 
every other well-conducted man of his century. He did 
not tind Annapolis, or even Philadelphia, too far away 
to be visited for the pleasure of seeing a good horse- 
race or enjoying a round of balls and evenings at the 
theatre, to shake the rustic dulness off of a too constant 
stay at home. Mrs. Washington enjoyed such outings, 
such little flings into the simple world of provincial 
fashion, as much as he did ; and they could not sit wait- 
ing all the year for the short season at Williamsburg. 

A young man at once so handsome, so famous, and so 
punctilious in point of dress as Colonel Washington 
could not but make a notable figure in any society. " I 
want neither lace nor embroidery," was the order he 
sent to London. " Plain clothes, with a gold or silver 
button (if worn in genteel dress), are all I desire. My 
stature is six feet ; otherwise rather slender than corpu- 
lent." But he was careful the material, the color, and 



112 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

the fit should be of the best and most tasteful, and that 
very elegant stuffs should be provided from over sea 
for Mrs. Washington and her children, and very sub- 
stantial for the servants who were to be in attendance 
upon the household — a livery of white and scarlet. 
'Twas a point of pride with Virginians to know how to 
dress, both well and in the fashion ; and the master of 
Mount Vernon would have deemed it an impropriety to 
be less careful than his neighbors, less well dressed than 
his station and fortune warranted. He watched the 
tradesmen sharply. " Tis a custom, I have some reason 
to believe, with many shopkeepers and tradesmen in 
London,' 1 he wrote bluntly to the Messrs. Gary, " when 
they know goods are bespoken for exportation, to palm 
sometimes old, and sometimes very slight and indiffer- 
ent, goods upon us, taking care at the same time to ad- 
vance the price," and he wished them informed that 
their distant customers would not be so duped. 

He longed once and again to be quit of the narrow 
life of the colony, and stretch himself for a little upon 
the broader English stage at home. " But I am tied by 
the leg"," he told his friends there, "and must set in- 
clination aside. My indulging myself in a trip to Eng- 
land depends upon so many contingencies, which, in all 
probability, may never occur, that I dare not even think 
of such a gratification." But the disappointment bred 
no real discontent. There could be no better air or 
company to come to maturity in than were to be had 
there in Virginia, if a young man were poised and mas- 
ter of himself. " We have few things here striking to 
European travellers (except our abundant woods)," he 
professed, when he wrote to his kinsman Richard Wash- 
ington in England ; " but little variety, a welcome recep- 



MOUNT VERNON DAYS 113 

tion among a few friends, and the open and prevalent 
hospitality of the country"; but it was a land that bred 
men, and men of affairs, in no common fashion. 

Especially now, after the quickening of pulses that 
had come with the French war, and its sweep of con- 
tinental, even of international, forces across the colonial 
stage, hitherto set only for petty and sectional affairs. 
The colonies had grown self-conscious and restless as 
the plot thickened and thrust them forward to a rule 
of consequence in the empire such as they had never 
thought to play, and the events which succeeded hurried 
them to a quick maturity. It was a season a young 
man was sure to ripen in, and there was good company. 
The House of Burgesses was very quiet the year Wash- 
ington first took his place in it and stood abashed to 
hear himself praised ; but before Mr. Robinson, its al- 
ready veteran Speaker, was dead, a notable change had 
set in. Within five years, before the county on the St. 
Lawrence and the lakes was well out of the hands of 
the French, the Parliament in England had entered 
upon measures of government which seemed meant of 
deliberate purpose to set the colonies agog, and every 
body of counsellors in America stood between anger 
and amazement to see their people in danger to be so 
put upon. 

The threat and pressure of the French power upon 
the frontiers had made the colonies thoughtful always, 
so long as it lasted, of their dependence upon England 
for succor and defence should there come a time of 
need. Once and again — often enough to keep them 
sensible how they must stand or fall, succeed or fail, 
with the power at home — their own raw levies had 
taken part with the King's troops out of England in 



114 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

some clumsy stroke or other against a French strong- 
hold in the North or a Spanish fortress in the South ; 
and now at last they had gone with English troops into 
the field in a national cause. Provincials and redcoats 
had joined for a final grapple with the French, to settle 
once and for all who should be owners and masters on 
the coveted continent. The issue had been decisive. 
By the summer of 1760 Washington could write his 
kinsman in England that the French were so thoroughly 
drubbed and humbled that there remained little to do 
to reduce Canada from end to end to the British power. 
But the very thoroughness of the success wrought a 
revolution in the relations of the colonies to the mother- 
country. It rid them of their sense of dependence. 
English regiments had mustered their thousands, no 
doubt, upon the battle-fields of the war in order that 
the colonies might be free to possess the continent, and 
it was hard to see how the thing could have been ac- 
complished without them. But it had been accom- 
plished, and would not need to be done again. More- 
over, it had shown the colonial militia how strong they 
were even in the presence of regulars. They had almost 
everywhere borne an equal part in the fighting, and, 
rank and file, they had felt with a keen resentment the 
open contempt for their rude equipment and rustic dis- 
cipline which too many arrogant officers and insolent 
men among the regulars had shown. They knew that 
they had proved themselves the equals of any man in 
the King's pay in the fighting, and they had come out 
of the hot business confident that henceforth, at any 
rate, they could dispense with English troops and take 
care of themselves. They had lost both their fear of 
the French and their awe of the English. 



THE HEAT OF POLITICS 



CHAPTER V 

'Twas hardly an opportune time for statesmen in 
London to make a new and larger place for England's 
authority in America, and yet that was what they im- 
mediately attempted. Save Chatham and Burke and a 
few discerning men who had neither place nor power, 
there was no longer any one in England who knew, 
though it were never so vaguely, the real temper and 
character of the colonists. 'Twas matter of common 
knowledge and comment, it is true, that the men of 
Massachusetts were beyond all reason impatient of com- 
mand or restraint, affecting an independence which w r as 
hardly to be distinguished from contumacy and insubor- 
dination ; but what ground was there to suppose that a 
like haughty and ungovernable spirit lurked in the loyal 
and quiet South, or among the prudent traders and 
phlegmatic farmers who were making the middle colo- 
nies so rich, and so regardful of themselves in every 
point of gain or interest ? Statesmen of an elder gener- 
ation had had a sure instinct what must be the feeling 
of Englishmen in America, and had, with a a wise and 
salutary neglect," suffered them to take their own way 
in every matter of self-government. Though ministry 
after ministry had asserted a rigorous and exacting 
supremacy for the mother -country in every affair of 
commerce, and had determined as they pleased what 



118 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

the colonies should be suffered to manufacture, and how 
they should be allowed to trade — with what merchants, 
in what commodities, in what bottoms, within what 
limits — they had nevertheless withheld their hands 
hitherto from all direct exercise of authority in the 
handling of the internal affairs of the several settle- 
ments, had given them leave always to originate their 
own legislation and their own measures of finance, until 
self-government had become with them a thing as if of 
immemorial privilege. Sir William Keith, sometime 
Governor of Pennsylvania, had suggested to Sir Robert 
Walpole that he should raise revenue from the colonies. 
"What!" exclaimed that shrewd master of men. "I 
have Old England set against me, and do you think I 
will have New England likewise ?" 

But men had come into authority in England now 
who lacked this stout sagacity, and every element of 
sound discretion. English arms and English money, 
they could say, had swept the French power from 
America in order that the colonies might no longer suf- 
fer menace or rivalry. A great debt had been piled up 
in the process. Should not the colonies, who had reaped 
the chief benefit, bear part of the cost? They had 
themselves incurred burdensome debts, no doubt, in the 
struggle, and their assemblies would very likely profess 
themselves willing to vote what thev could should his 
Majesty call upon them and press them. But an ade- 
quate and orderly system of taxation could not be 
wrought out by the separate measures of a dozen petty 
legislatures; 'twere best the taxation should be direct 
and by Parliament, whose authority, surety, no man 
outside turbulent Boston would be mad enough seriously 
to question or resist. It would, in any event, be whole- 



THE HEAT OF POLITICS 119 

some, now the colonies were likely to grow lusty as 
kingdoms in their roomy continent, to assert a mother's 
power to use and restrain — a power by no means lost 
because too long unexercised and neglected. It was with 
such wisdom the first step was taken. In March, 1764, 
Parliament voted it "just and necessary that a revenue 
be raised in America," passed an act meant to secure 
duties on wines and sugars, and took measures to in- 
crease the efficiency of the revenue service in America. 

George Grenville was Prime - Minister. He lacked 
neither official capacity nor acquaintance with affairs. 
He thought it just the colonists should pay their quota 
into the national treasury, seeing they were so served 
by the national power ; and he declared that in the 
next session of Parliament he should propose certain 
direct taxes in addition to the indirect already in force. 
He saw no sufficient reason to doubt that the colonies 
would acquiesce, if not without protest, at least without 
tumult or dangerous resistance. It was a sad blunder. 
Virginia resented threat and execution alike in such a 
matter as deeply as did litigious Massachusetts. A long 
generation ago, in the quiet year 1732, when bluff Sir 
Robert was Prime-Minister, there had been an incident 
which Governor Keith, maybe, had forgotten. The 
ministry had demanded of Massachusetts that she 
should establish a fixed salary for her governors by a 
standing grant; but she had refused, and the ministers 
had receded. The affair had not been lost upon the 
other colonies. That sturdy onetime royal Governor, 
Alexander Spotswood, in Virginia, had noted it very 
particularly, and spoken of it very bluntly, diligent ser- 
vant of the crown as he was, to Colonel William Byrd, 
when he came his way on his " progress to the mines." 



12 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

He declared " that if the Assembly in New England 
Avould stand bluff, he did not see how they could be 
forced to raise money against their will , for if they 
should direct it to be done by act of Parliament, which 
they have threatened to do (though it be against the 
right of Englishmen to be taxed but by their representa- 
tives), yet they would find it no easy matter to put such 
an act in execution." No observing man could so much 
as travel in Virginia without finding very promptly 
what it was that gave point and poignancy to such an 
opinion. That quiet gentleman the Rev. Andrew Bur- 
naby, Yicar of Greenwich, was in Virginia in 1750, and 
saw plainly enough how matters stood. " The public 
or political character of the Virginians," he said, " cor- 
responds with their private one ; they are haughty and 
jealous of their liberties, impatient of restraint, and can 
scarcely bear the thought of being controlled by any 
superior power. Many of them consider the colonies as 
independent states, not connected with Great Britain 
otherwise than by having the same common King and 
being bound to her with natural affection." Not only 
so, but " they think it a hardship not to have an un- 
limited trade to every part of the world." All this, and 
more, Grenville might have learned by the simple pains 
of inquiry. One had but to open his eyes and look to 
see how imperious a race had been bred in the almost 
feudal South ; and, for all they had never heard revolu- 
tionary talk thence, ministers ought to have dreaded 
the leisure men had there to think, the provocation to 
be proud, the necessity to be masterful and individual, 
quite as much as they had ever dreaded the stubborn 
temper and the quick capacity for united action they 
had once and again seen excited in New England. 



THE HEAT OF POLITICS 121 

It was not necessary to try new laws to see what the 
colonies would do if provoked. The difficulty already 
encountered in enforcing the laws of trade was object- 
lesson enough ; and the trouble in that matter had 
grown acute but yesterday. For long, indeed, no one 
in the colonies questioned the right of Parliament to 
regulate their trade ; but it was notorious that the laws 
actually enacted in that matter had gone smoothly off 
in America only because they were not seriously en- 
forced. " The trade hither is engrossed by the Saints 
of New England," laughed Colonel Byrd, " who carry 
off a great deal of tobacco without troubling themselves 
with paying that impertinent duty of a penny a pound." 
The Acts of Trade practically forbade direct commerce 
with foreign countries or their dependencies, especially 
in foreign bottoms; but ships from France, Spain, and 
the Canary Isles came and went very freely, notwithstand- 
ing, m colonial ports ; for royal officials liked to enjoy a 
comfortable peace and the esteem of their neighbors, 
and very genially winked at such trangressions. Car- 
goes without number were sent to the Dutch and Span- 
ish West Indies every year, and as many brought thence, 
which were undoubtedly forfeit under the navigation 
laws Parliament had been at such pains to elaborate 
and enforce ; and privateering as well as smuggling had 
for long afforded the doughty seamen of Boston, Salem, 
Charleston, and New York a genteel career of profit. 
Things had come to such a pass that where business 
went briskly the people of the colonial ports demanded 
as of right " a full freedom of illegal trade," and broke 
sometimes into riot when it was denied them. The 
Boston News Letter had been known very courteously 
to mourn the death of a worthy collector of his Majes- 



122 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

ty's customs because, " with much humanity," he had 
been used to take " pleasure in directing masters of vessels 
how they ought to avoid the breach of the Acts of 
Trade." Sea captains grew accustomed to very confi- 
dential relations with owners and consignees, and knew 
very well, without official counsel, how to take the ad- 
vice " not to declare at the Custom-house " ; and things 
went very easily and cordially with all parties to the 
understanding. 

In 1761 that understanding was of a sudden rudely 
broken and the trouble began, which Grenville had the 
folly to add to. The Board of Trade determined to col- 
lect the duties on sugar, molasses, and rum, so long and 
so systematically evaded in the trade between New Eng- 
gland and the West Indies, at whatever cost of suit and 
scrutiny, and directed their agents in Boston to demand 
kk writs of assistance" from the courts, giving them leave 
to enter what premises they would in search of smug- 
gled goods. There were instant exasperation and resist- 
ance. General search - warrants, opening every man's 
door to the officers of the law, with or without just and 
explicit ground of suspicion against him, no English 
subject anywhere would submit to ; and yet these writs 
authorized nothing less. Issued under a questionable 
extension to America of an exceptional power of the 
Court of Exchequer, they violated every precedent of 
the common law, no less than every principle of prudent 
administration; and the excitement which they pro- 
voked was at once deep and ominous. Sharp resistance 
was made in the courts, and no officer ever ventured to 
serve one of the obnoxious writs. Such challenge of 
the process was uttered by colonial counsel upon trial of 
the right, moreover, that ministers would be without 



THE HEAT OF POLITICS 123 

excuse should they ignore the warning, so explicit and 
so eloquent of revolutionary purpose. It was James 
Otis who uttered it. He had but the other day carried 
the royal commission in his pocket as Advocate-General 
in his Majesty's Court of Admiralty ; but he would not 
have scrupled, even as his Majesty's servant, he said, to 
oppose the exercise of a power which had already cost 
one King his head and another his throne. To oppose 
in such a case was to defend the very constitution under 
which the King wore his crown. That constitution se- 
cured to Englishmen everywhere the rights of freemen; 
the colonists had, besides, the plain guarantees of their 
own charters ; if constitution and charter failed, or were 
gainsaid, the principles of natural reason sufficed for de- 
fence against measures so arrogant and so futile. No 
lawyer could justify these extraordinary writs ; no King 
with an army at his back could ever force them to exe- 
cution. 

Protest not only, but defiance, rang very clear in these 
fearless words; and ministers must avow themselves 
very ignorant should they pretend they did not know 
how Mr. Otis had kindled fire from one end of the colo- 
nies to the other. But Grenville was resolute to take 
all risks and push his policy. He did not flinch from 
the enforcement of the measures of 1764, and in the ses- 
sion of 1765 calmly fulfilled his promise of further taxa- 
tion. He proposed that the colonists should be required 
to use revenue stamps upon all their commercial paper, 
legal documents, pamphlets, and newspapers ; and that, 
at once as a general measure of convenience and a salu- 
tary exhibition of authority, his Majesty's troops sta- 
tioned in the plantations should be billeted on the peo- 
ple. Parliament readily acquiesced. It was thus Gren- 



124 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

ville purposed " defraying the expenses of defending, 
protecting, and securing" the colonies; but he came 
near losing them instead. The act was passed in 
March ; it was not to go into effect until November ; but 
the colonists did not keep him waiting until November 
for their protests. It was the voice of a veritable 
tempest that presently came over sea to the ear of the 
startled minister. And it was not the General Court of 
turbulent Massachusetts, but the House of Burgesses of 
loyal Virginia that first spoke the general indignation. 
Already in the autumn of 1764, upon the mere threat of 
what was to come, that House had spoken very urgently 
against the measures proposed, in a memorial to King 
and Parliament, which, amidst every proper phrase of 
loyalty and affection, had plainly declared it the opin- 
ion of his Majesty's subjects in Virginia that such acts 
would be in flat violation of their undoubted rights and 
liberties; and the committee by which that memorial 
was drawn up had contained almost every man of chief 
consequence in the counsels of the colony, the King's 
Attorney-General himself not excepted. But it was one 
thing to protest against measures to come and quite 
another to oppose their execution when enacted into 
laws. The one was constitutional agitation ; the other, 
flat rebellion — little less. It was very ominous to read 
the words of the extraordinary resolutions passed by 
the Burgesses on the 30th of May, 1765, after the Stamp 
Act had become law, and note the tone of restrained 
passion that ran through them. They declared that 
from the first the settlers of " his Majesty's colony and 
dominion" of Virginia had possessed and enjoyed all 
the privileges, franchises, and immunities at any time 
enjoyed by the people of Great Britain itself; and that 



THE HEAT OF POLITICS 125 

this, their freedom, had been explicitly secured to them 
by their charters, " to all intents and purposes as if they 
had been abiding and born within the realm of Eng- 
land " ; " that the taxation of the people by themselves 
or by persons chosen by themselves to represent them " 
was " a distinguishing characteristic of British freedom, 
without which the ancient constitution " of the realm 
itself could not subsist ; " and that his Majesty's liege 
people of this most ancient colony" had "uninter- 
ruptedly enjoyed the right of being thus governed by 
their assemblies in the article of their taxes and internal 
police," had never forfeited or relinquished it, and had 
seen it " constantly recognized by the Kings and people 
of Great Britain." 

Spoken as it was in protest against actual legislation 
already adopted by Parliament in direct despite of all 
such privileges and immunities, this declaration of rights 
seemed to lack its conclusion. The constitutional rights 
of Virginians had been invaded. What then ? Resolved, 
therefore, " that his Majesty's liege people, the inhabi- 
tants of this colony, are not bound to yield obedience to 
any law or ordinance whatever designed to impose any 
taxation whatsoever upon them, other than the laws 
or ordinances of the General Assembly aforesaid," and 
" that any person who shall, by speaking or writing, 
assert or maintain " the contrary " shall be deemed an 
enemy of his Majesty's colony." Such had been the 
uncompromising conclusion drawn by the mover of the 
resolutions. What other conclusion could any man 
draw if he deemed the colonists men, and proud men at 
that ? But the Burgesses would not go so far or be so 
explicit. They feared to speak treason ; they were con- 
tent to protest of their rights, and let the issue bring 



120 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

conclusions to light. It had been hot fighting to get 
even that much said. The men hitherto accepted al- 
ways as leaders in the House had wished to hold it 
back from rash and heated action, and there had been 
bitter debates before even those significant premises for 
a revolutionary conclusion had been forced to adoption. 
Old leaders and new, young men and old alike, had will- 
ingly united in the memorial of 1764 ; but now that the 
Stamp Act was law, conservative members shrank from 
doing* what must look so like a flat defiance of Parlia- 
merit. Only young men would have had the audacity 
to urge such action ; only very extraordinary young 
men would have had the capacity to induce the House 
to take it. But such young men were at hand, their 
leader as veritable a democrat as had ever taken the 
floor in that assembly. 

Patrick Henry was not of the aristocracy of the col- 
ony. Good Scots blood ran in his veins, quickened by the 
lively strain of an old Welsh stock. His father came of 
a race of scholars, and, good churchman though he was, 
knew his Livy and his Horace better than his Bible. 
His mother came of a vivacious line of easy-going wits 
and talkers, which but a touch more of steadiness and 
energy might any day have made famous. His father 
had served his county of Hanover very capably and ac- 
ceptably as surveyor, colonel, magistrate, and his uncle 
had been beloved as the faithful pastor of quiet parishes. 
But they had been no long time in the colony; they 
lived back from the tide-water counties where the real 
aristocracy had its strength and supremacy ; they were 
of that middle class of yeomen-gentlemen who love lib- 
erty but do not affect rank. " A vigorous aristocracy 
favors the growth of personal eminence even in those 



THE HEAT OF POLITICS 127 

who are not of it, but only near it," and these plain men 
of the middle counties were the more excellent and in- 
dividual in the cultivation of their powers by reason of 
the contact. But there was a touch of rusticity, a neg- 
lect of polish, a rough candor of speech, about them 
which set them apart and distinguished them sharply 
enough when they came into the presence of the courtly 
and formal gentlemen who practised the manners of 
London in the river counties. Patrick Henry, at any 
rate, must have seemed a very rustic figure to the Bur- 
gesses when he first came to take his seat amongst them 
on a May day in 1765. He was known, indeed, to 
many. This was the man, they must have known, who 
had won so strange a verdict from a jury two years ago 
in the celebrated parsons' case at Hanover court-house, 
against the law and the evidence. But his careless 
dress and manner, his loose, ungainly figure, his listless, 
absent bearing, must have set many a courtly member 
staring. For such men as Washington, indeed, there 
can have been nothing either strange or unattractive in 
the rough exterior and unstudied ways of the new mem- 
ber. Punctilious though he was himself in every point 
of dress and bearing, Washington's life had most of it 
been spent with men who looked thus, and yet were 
stuff of true courage and rich capacity within. The 
manner of a man could count as no test of quality with 
him. His experience had covered the whole variety of 
Virginian life. He was an aristocrat by taste, not by 
principle. And Patrick Henry had, in fact, come to the 
same growth as he in essential quality and principle, 
though by another way. Henry's life had been wilful, 
capricious, a bit haphazard, Washington's all the while 
subject to discipline; but both men had touched and 



12 8 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

seen the whole energy of the commonwealth, knew its 
hope, could divine its destiny. There was but one Vir- 
ginia, and they were her children. It could not take 
long to bring them to an understanding and comrade- 
ship in affairs. 

It was characteristic of the new member that he 
should step at once and unhesitatingly to a place of lead- 
ership when debate of the Stamp Act stirred the House, 
and that he should instantly sweep the majority into 
his following with a charm and dash of eloquence that 
came like a revelation upon the quiet assembly. lie 
was but twenty-nine years old, but he had spent all his 
life in learning how the world went, and by what man- 
ner of speech it was moved and governed. He had 
roamed the woods witli no thought but for sport, or a 
quiet hour with a book or his fancy in the shade of the 
trees. He had kept a country store, and let gossip and 
talk of affairs of colony and country-side take prece- 
dence of business. Finally he had turned with a per- 
manent relish to the law, and had set himself to plead 
causes for his neighbors in a way that made judges stare 
and juries surrender at discretion. In everything he 
had seemed to read the passions of men. Books no less 
than men, the chance company of an old author no less 
than the constant talk of the neighborly land he lived 
in, seemed to fill him with the quick principles of the 
people and polity to which he belonged, and to lend 
him as inevitably every living phrase in which to ut- 
ter them. The universal sympathy and insight which 
made his pleasantry so engaging to men of every stamp 
rendered his power no less than terrible when he turned 
to play upon their passions. He was not conscious of 
any audacity when he sprang to his feet upon the in- 



THE HEAT OF POLITICS 129 

stant he saw the House resolved into committee to con- 
sider the Stamp Act. It was of the ardor of his nature 
to speak when conviction moved him strongly, without 
thought of propriety or precedence ; and it was like him 
to stand there absorbed, reading his resolutions from a 
fly-leaf torn from an old law-book. 

It seemed no doubt a precious piece of audacity in 
the e} T es of the prescriptive leaders of the House to hear 
this almost unknown man propose his high recital of 
Virginia's liberties and his express defiance of Parlia- 
ment — in tones which rang no less clear and confident 
upon the clause which declared " his Majesty's liege 
people " of the colony in no way bound to yield obedi- 
ence, than in the utterance of the accepted matter of 
his premises. Debate flamed up at once, hot, even pas- 
sionate. The astounding, moving eloquence of the 
young advocate, his instant hold upon the House, the 
directness with which he purposed and executed action 
in so grave a matter, stirred the pulses of his opponents 
and his followers with an equal power, and roused those 
who would have checked him to a vehemence as great 
as his own. The old leaders of the House, with whom 
he now stood face to face in this critical business, were 
the more formidable because of the strong reason of 
their position. No one could justly doubt that they 
wished to see the Old Dominion keep and vindicate her 
liberty, but they deemed it folly to be thus intemperately 
beforehand with the issue. Almost to a man they were 
sprung of families who had come to Virginia with the 
great migration that had brought the Washingtons, in 
the evil day when so many were fleeing England to be 
quit of the Puritan tyranny — n^alists all, and touched 
to the quick with the sentiment of loyalty. 'Twas now 



130 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

a long time since Crom well's day, indeed ; generations 
had passed, and a deep passion for Virginia had been 
added to that old reverence for the wearer of the crown 
in England. But these men prided themselves still upon 
their loyalty ; made it a point of honor to show them- 
selves no agitators, but constitutional statesmen. It 
made them grave and deeply anxious to see the privi- 
leges that were most dear to them thus violated and 
denied, but it did not make them hasty to quarrel with 
the Parliament of the realm. They had intended oppo- 
sition, but they feared to throw their cause away by 
defiance. 'Twas as little wise as dignified to flout thus 
at the sovereign power before all means had been ex- 
hausted to win it to forbearance. 

It was not the least part of the difficulty to face the 
veteran Speaker, John Robinson, so old in affairs, so 
stately in his age, so gravely courteous, and yet with 
such a threat of good manners against those who should 
make breach of the decorous traditions of the place. 
But the men chiefly to be feared were on the floor. 
There was Richard Bland, " wary, old, experienced," 
with "something of the look," a Virginian wit said, 
"of old musty parchments, which he handleth and 
studieth much," author of a " treatise against the Quak- 
ers on water-baptism"; with none of the gifts of an 
orator, but a veritable antiquarian in law and the pre- 
cedents of public business, a very formidable man in 
counsel. Quiet men trusted him, and thought his pru- 
dence very wise. George Wythe was no less learned, 
and no less influential. Men knew him a man of letters, 
bringing the knowledge of many wise books to the 
practice of affairs, and set great store by his sincerity, as 
artless as it was human, and sweetened with good i J ee! 



THE HEAT OF POLITICS 131 

ing. It made Eandolph and Pendleton and Nicholas, 
the elder orators of the House, seem the more redoubt- 
able that they should have such men as these at their 
elbows to prompt and steady them. And yet they would 
have been formidable enough of themselves. Edmund 
Pendleton had not, indeed, the blood or the breeding 
that gave his colleagues prestige. He had won his way 
to leadership by his own steady genius for affairs. He 
read nothing but law-books, knew nothing but business, 
cared for nothing but to make practical test of his 
powers. But he took all his life and purpose with such 
a zest, made every stroke with so serene a self-posses- 
sion, was so quick to see and act upon every advantage 
in his business of debate, and was withal so transparent, 
bore himself with such a grace and charm of manner, 
was so obviously right-minded and upright, that it meant 
a great deal to the House to hear him intervene in its 
discussions with his melodious voice, his cool, distinct, 
effective elocution. Robert Carter Nicholas added to 
like talents for business and debate a reverent piety, a 
title to be loved and trusted without question, which no 
man ever thought to gainsay. And Peyton Randolph, 
with his "knowledge, temper, experience, judgment, in- 
tegrity " as of a true Roman spirit, was a sort of prince 
among the rest. No man could doubt he wished Vir- 
ginia to have her liberties. He had gone over sea to 
speak for her in Dinwiddie's day, though he was the 
King's attorney, and had lost his office for his boldness. 
But there were traditions of loyalty and service in his 
breeding which no man might rightly ignore. His 
father before him had won knighthood and the royal 
favor by long and honorable service as his Majesty's 
attorney in the colony. Pride and loyalty had gone 



132 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

hand in hand in the annals of a proud race, and had 
won for the Randolphs a prestige which made it impos- 
sible Sir John's son should very long be kept from the 
office he had so honorably inherited. And so Peyton 
Randolph was now once again the King's attorney. It 
was not as the King's officer, however, but as an ex- 
perienced Parliamentary tactician, a trained debater, a 
sound man of affairs, that he had set himself to check 
Henry in his revolutionary courses. 

Henry found himself, in truth, passionately set upon. 
Even threats were uttered, and abuse such as proud 
men find ill to bear. They cried " Treason ! treason !" 
upon him when he dared declare the King would do 
well to look to the fate of Caesar and Charles the First 
for profitable examples. But he was not daunted a 
whit. "If this be treason, make the most of it," was 
his defiance to them. One ally who might have stood 
with him, had he known, was absent. Richard Henry 
Lee would have brought to his support a name as an- 
cient and as honorable as any in the colony, and an 
eloquence scarcely less than his own. But, as it was, 
he was left almost alone, and won his battle with no 
other aid than very plain men could lend by vote and 
homely utterance. The vote was very close, but enough. 
Randolph flung out of the House, muttering in his heat 
that he "would have given five hundred guineas for a 
single vote." Henry, taking the triumph very simply, 
as was his wont, and knowing his work for the session 
done, quietly made his way homeward that very day, 
striding unconcernedly down Duke of Gloucester Street, 
chatting with a friend, his legs clad in buckskin as if 
for the frontier, his saddle-bags and the reins of his lean 
nag slung carelessly over his arm. 



THE HEAT OF POLITICS 133 

The Assembly had adopted Henry's declaration of 
rights, not his resolution of disobedience, and had soft- 
ened a little the language he would have used ; but its 
action seemed seditious enough to Fauquier, the Gov- 
ernor, and he promptly dissolved them. It did little 
good to send Virginians home, however, if the object 
was to check agitation. The whole manner of their 
life bred thought and concert of action. Where men 
have leave to be individual, live separately and with a 
proud self-respect, and yet are much at each other's 
tables, often in vestry council together, constantly com- 
ing and going, talking and planning throughout all the 
country - side, accustomed to form their opinions in 
league, and yet express each man his own with a dash 
and flavor of independence ; where there is the leisure 
te reflect, the habit of joint efforts in business, the spirit 
to be social, and abundant opportunity to be frank withal, 
if you will — you may look to see public views form 
themselves very confidently, and as easily without as- 
semblies as with them. Washington had taken no part 
in the stormy scenes of the House, but had sat calmly 
apart rather, concerned and thoughtful. He was not 
easily caught by the excitement of a sudden agita- 
tion. He had the soldier's steady habit of self-pos- 
session in the presence of a crisis, and his own way 
of holding things at arm's-length for scrutiny — "like 
a bishop at his prayers," a wag said. He had a sol- 
dier's loyalty, too, and slowness at rebellion. His 
thought, no doubt, was with the conservatives, whatever 
may have been the light that sprang into his quiet 
eye when Henry's voice rang out so like a clarion, 
calling Virginia to her standard ; and he went home, 
upon the dissolution, to join and aid his neighbors in 



134 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

the slow discussion which must shape affairs to an 
issue. 

"The Virginia Eesolutions" had run like a flame 
through the colonies — not as the Burgesses had adopted 
them, but as Henry had drawn them, with their express 
threat of disobedience. Nor was that all. October, 
1765, saw delegates from nine colonies come together 
in New York, at the call of Massachusetts, to take coun- 
sel what should be done. Every one knew that Vir- 
ginia, North Carolina, and Georgia, the only colonies 
absent from the " congress, 7 ' would have sent delegates 
too had their Governors not prevented them by the dis- 
solution of their Assemblies before they could act on the 
call. A deep excitement and concern had spread every- 
where throughout the settlements. Not only did the 
impending enforcement of the act engross "the conver- 
sation of the speculative part of the colonists," as Wash- 
ington wrote to Francis Dandridge in London ; it prom- 
ised to engross also the energies of very active, and it 
might be very violent, men in many quarters, and it be- 
gan to grow evident that some part of government itself 
would be brought to a standstill by its processes. " Our 
courts of judicature," declared Washington, "must inevi- 
tably be shut up ; for it is impossible (or next of kin to 
it), under our present circumstances, that the act of Par- 
liament can be complied with . . . ; and if a stop be put 
to our judicial proceedings, I fancy the merchants of 
Great Britain trading to the colonies will not be among 
the last to wish for a repeal of it." The congress at 
New York drew up nothing less than a bill of rights 
and immunities, and sent resolutions over sea which ar- 
rested the attention of the world. The Virginian As- 
sembly despatched like papers for itself ; and Eichard 



THE HEAT OF POLITICS 135 

Henry Lee, when he had assisted to draw its memorials, 
hastened home to form in his own Cavalier county a 
"Westmoreland Association,' 1 whose members (four 
Washingtons among the rest) bound themselves by a 
solemn covenant to " exert every faculty to prevent the 
execution of the said Stamp Act in any instance what- 
soever within this colony." The ministry could not 
stand the pressure. They gave way to Lord Rocking- 
ham, and the act was repealed. 

Meanwhile Washington, his calm temper unshaken, 
was slowly coming to a clear vision of affairs in all their 
significance. Fox-hunting did not cease. He was much 
in the saddle and at table with the Fairfaxes, whom 
nothing could shake from their allegiance, and who 
looked with sad forebodings upon the temper the colony 
was in. It was proper they should speak so if they 
deemed it just, and Washington had no intolerance for 
what they urged. But George Mason, the neighbor 
whom he most trusted, was of a very different mind, 
and strengthened and confirmed him in other counsels. 
Mason was six years his senior ; a man, too, cast by nat- 
ure to understand men and events, how they must go 
and how be guided. They conferred constantly, at 
every turn of their intimate life, in the field or in the 
library, mounted or afoot in the forests, and came very 
deliberately and soberly to their statesman's view. 
Randolph and Pendleton and Wythe and Bland had 
themselves turned, after the first hesitation, to act with 
ardent men like Lee in framing the memorials to Kino:, 
Lords, and Commons which were to go from the Bur- 
gesses along with the resolutions of the Stamp Act 
Congress in Kew York ; and Washington, who had 
never hesitated, but had only gone slowly and with his 



13 6 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

eyes open, with that self-poise men had found so strik- 
ing in him from the first, came steadily with the rest to 
the at last common purpose of resolute opposition. The 
repeal of the act came to all like a great deliverance. 

Governor Fauquier had deemed it his duty to dissolve 
the Assembly upon the passage of Henry's resolutions, 
but he had acted without passion in the matter, and had 
kept the respect of the men he dealt with. He was not 
a man, indeed, to take public business very seriously, 
bavins' been bred a man of fashion and a courtier rather 
than a master of affairs. He loved gay company and 
the deep excitement of the gaming-table, not the round 
of official routine. Affable, generous, elegant, a scholar 
and real lover of letters, he vastly preferred the talk of 
vivacious women and accomplished men to the business 
of the General Court, and was a man to be liked rather 
than consulted. Washington, always admitted to the 
intimacy of official circles at Williamsburg, very likely 
relished the gallant Fauquier better than the too officious 
Dinwiddie. It was, unhappily, no portent to see a man 
still devoted to dissipation at sixty-two, even though he 
were Governor of one of his Majesty's colonies and a 
trusted servant of the crown ; and Fauquier's gifts as a 
man of wit and of instructed tastes made his companion- 
ship no less acceptable to Washington than to the other 
men of discernment who frequented the ballrooms and 
receptions, ate formal dinners, and played quiet games 
of cards during the brief season at the little capital. It 
did not seriously disturb life there that the Governor 
upheld the power of Parliament to tax, while the Bur- 
gesses strenuously opposed it. Washington, for one, 
did not hesitate on that account to be seen often in 
friendly talk with the Governor, or to accept frequent 



THE HEAT OF POLITICS 137 

invitations to the " palace/' He was of the temper 
which has so distinguished the nobler sort of English- 
men in politics: he might regard opposition as a public 
duty, but he never made it a ground of personal feeling 
or private spite. In a sense, indeed, he had long been 
regarded as belonging to official circles in the colony, 
more intimately than any other man who did not hold 
office. He had been put forward by the Fairfaxes in 
his youth ; men in the Council and at the head of af- 
fairs had been his sponsors and friends from the first ; 
he had been always, like his brother before him, a mem- 
ber of one of the chief groups in the colony for influence 
and a confidential connection with the public business. 
It was even understood that he was himself destined 
for the Council, when it should be possible to put him 
in it without seeming to give too great a preponderance 
to the Fairfax interest, already so much regarded in its 
make-up. 

The first flurry of differing views and conflicting pur- 
poses among the Virginian leaders had passed off. The 
judgment of high-spirited men everywhere sustained 
Henry — gave him unmistakable authentication as a 
leader ; put all public men in the way of understanding 
their constituents. Some were bold and some were 
timid, but all were animated by the same hope and pur- 
pose, and few were yet intemperate. "Sensible of the 
importance of unanimity among our constituents," said 
Jefferson afterwards, looking back to that time when 
he was young and in the first flush of his radical senti- 
ments, " although we often wished to have gone faster, 
we slackened our pace, that our less ardent colleagues 
might keep up with us ; and they, on their part, differ- 
ing nothing from us in principle, quickened their gait 



138 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

somewhat beyond that which their prudence might of 
itself have advised." Patrick Henry was received to 
the place he had earned; and although the older leaders 
resumed that sway in counsel to which their tried skill 
and varied experience in affairs fairly entitled them, 
there was no longer any jealous exclusion of new men. 
Henry's fame crept through the colonies as the man 
who had first spoken the mind not of Virginians only, 
but of all just men, with regard to the liberties of Eng- 
lishmen in America. Before a year was out Richard 
Bland himself, parchment man and conservative that he 
was, had written and published a pamphlet entitled " An 
Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies," which 
said nothing less than that in all that concerned her 
internal affairs Virginia was "a distinct, independent 
state," though " united with the parent state by the 
closest league and amity, and under the same alle- 
giance." A colony " treated with injury and violence," 
he exclaimed, " is become an alien." When antiquari- 
ans and lawyers, fresh from poring upon old documents, 
spoke thus, there were surely signs of the times. 

The government at home kept colonial sentiment very 
busy. Even Lord Rockingham's government, with 
Burke to admonish it, coupled its repeal of the stamp 
duties with a " declaratory act " which sought to quiet 
controversy by giving the lie direct to every argument 
urged against its authority in the colonies. " Parliament 
has power to bind the colonies in all cases whatsoever," 
was its round assertion : — " a resolution for England's 
right to do what the Treasury pleased with three mill- 
ions of freemen," cried Chatham. Though Rocking- 
ham's government would not act on that right, its suc- 
cessors would without scruple; and they were soon 



THE HEAT OF POLITICS 139 

about it, for Rockingham's ministry retained office 
scarcely a twelvemonth. Grenville was, indeed, dis- 
credited ; but Grafton and Townshend were as bad, as 
stubborn in temper, as reckless in policy. The year 1767 
saw taxes proposed and enacted on glass, paper, painters' 
colors, and tea imported into the colonies, with a pur- 
pose to pay fixed salaries to the crown's officers in the 
colonies out of the proceeds; and the contested ground 
was all to go over again. To show their temper, the 
new ministers suspended the legislative powers of the 
Colonial Assembly in New York for refusing to make 
provision for troops quartered upon the colony. To 
complete their fiscal arrangements they presently created 
a custom-house and board of revenue commissioners for 
America. It was an ominous year, and set opinion for- 
ward not a little in the colonies. 

The House of Burgesses broke, at its next session 
(1768), into fresh protests and remonstrances, and there 
was no one to restrain or rebuke it. Fauquier was dead, 
and gone to his reckoning; the reins of government were 
in the hands of gentle John Blair, President of the 
Council, a Virginian every inch, and with never a 
thought of checking his fellow-colonists in the expres- 
sion of their just opinions. The autumn brought Lord 
Botetourt, the new Governor - General, who came in 
showy state, and with genial display of courtly man- 
ners and good feeling ; but his arrival made little differ- 
ence. The Burgesses smiled to see him come to open 
their session of 1769 with pageant of coach and six, 
brave display of royal insignia, and the manner of a 
sovereign meeting Parliament; and turned from him al- 
most in contempt to denounce once more the course of 
the ministers, argue again the rights of America, de- 



14 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

clare they would draw the colonies together in concert- 
ed opposition, and call upon the other colonies to concur 
with them alike in their principles and in their purpose. 
Botetourt came hot foot to dissolve them ; but they 
only shifted their place of meeting, gathered again at 
the private house of Mr. Anthony Hay, and there re- 
solved no longer to import the things which Parliament 
had taxed in despite of them. George Mason had drawn 
the resolutions, at Washington's request, and Washing- 
ton himself presented them. 

Mason's thought had hastened very far along the path 
of opposition under the whip of England's policy; and 
Washington's quite as far. The government had not 
only sent troops to Boston and dissolved every Assem- 
bly that protested, but had advised the King to press 
prosecutions for treason in the colonies, and, should 
there be deemed sufficient ground, transport the accused 
to England to be tried by special commission. It was 
this last measure that had provoked the Burgesses to 
their hottest outburst. " At a time when our lordly 
masters in Great Britain will be satisfied with nothing 
less than the deprivation of American freedom," wrote 
Washington to Mason, with a sudden burst of passion, 
" it seems highly necessary that something should be 
done to avert the stroke, and maintain the liberty which 
we have derived from our ancestors. . . . That no man 
should scruple, or hesitate a moment, to use a-ms in de- 
fence of so valuable a blessing, on which all the good 
and evil of life depends, is clearly my opinion. Yet 
a-ms, I would beg leave to add, should be the last re- 
source." Addresses to the throne and remonstrances to 
Parliament had failed: it remained to try " starving 
their trades and manufactures," to see if that at last 



THE HEAT OF POLITICS 141 

would arrest their attention. No doubt even that would 
prove of little avail ; but it was at least peaceable and 
worth the trial. The next month, accordingly, he got 
unhesitatingly to his feet in the private meeting of the 
Burgesses at Mr. Hay's and moved George Mason's 
resolutions ; nor did he forget to subscribe his quota to 
the fund which was to defray the expenses of the " asso- 
ciation " there formed. 

The next evening he attended the " Queen's Birth- 
Night" at the palace with the same naturalness of de- 
meanor and frankness of dealing towards the Governor 
as before. Botetourt was not all show and gallantry, 
but was a genuine man at bottom. He had come to 
Virginia thinking the colonists a pleasure-loving people 
who could be taken by display and cajoled by hospital- 
ity : he had been told they were such in London. But 
he knew his mistake almost as soon as he had made it ; 
and was prompt, even while he upheld prerogative, to 
do what he could to deal with them in a liberal and 
manly spirit. He had acquiesced very heartily at the 
outset of his administration in a decision of the Council 
that writs of assistance could not legally be issued in 
Virginia, — for the process had been tried there too. He 
made such representations with regard to the state of 
the colony to the ministers at home as were both just 
and wise ; was assured in reply that the ministers were 
willing to make every necessary concession ; pledged 
his word in Virginia that there should be a substantial 
change of policy ; and died the sooner (October 15, 
1770) because the government would not, after all, re- 
deem his promises. " Your Governor is becoming very 
popular, as we are told here," wrote Arthur Lee to his 
brother, from London, " and I have the worst proof of 



142 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

it in the increased orders for fineries from the ladies. 1 ' 
Virginians did not find it easy to break an immemorial 
habit in order to starve the English trades and manu- 
factures ; and it was more than once necessary to urge 
and renew the non-importation agreements alike among 
the Burgesses and merchants at Williamsburg and by 
means of local associations throughout the colony. But 
Washington was punctilious to observe to the letter the 
agreements he had himself proposed. Again and again 
he bade his mercantile agents in London assist him to 
guard against any inadvertent breach of them: not to 
send him the articles Parliament had picked out for 
taxation in the colonies. 

Life still continued to go, it is true, with something 
of the old sumptuousness at Mount Vernon. It was in 
June, 1768, that Colonel Washington ordered a new 
chariot, " made in the newest taste, handsome, genteel, 
and light, to be made of the best seasoned wood, and by 
a celebrated workman," which was to cost him, fittings 
and all, £133. For all he grew uneasy lest the colonies' 
disagreement with England should come at last to a 
conflict of arms, he pushed his private interests with no 
abatement of thoroughness or self-possession, as if there 
were no fear but that things would long- enough stand 
as they were. He had not run surveyor's lines for Lord 
Fairfax, or assisted to drive the French from the Ohio, 
without seeing what fair lands lay upon the western 
rivers awaiting an owner; and, though there was still 
doubt how titles were to be established in that wilder- 
ness, he took care, through the good offices of an old 
comrade in arms, at least to be quietly beforehand with 
other claimants in setting up such titles as might be 
where the land lay richest and most accessible. " A 



THE HEAT OF POLITICS 14:} 

silent management " was what he advised, "snugly car- 
ried on under the guise of hunting other game," lest 
there should be a premature rush thither that would set 
rival interests a-clashing. A strange mixture of the 
shrewdness of the speculator and the honesty of the 
gentleman — claims pushed with privacy, but without 
trickery or chicane — ran through his letters to Captain 
Crawford, and drew as canny replies from the frontiered 
soldier. Business gave way often to sport and pleasure, 
too, as of old, when politics fell dull between sessions. 
Now it was the hunt ; then a gunning party in the 
woods ; and again a clay or two aboard his schooner, 
dropping down the river, and drawing the seine for 
sheepsheads upon the bar at Cedar Point. Even poli- 
tics was mixed with diversion. He must needs give a 
ball at Alexandria on the evening of his election to the 
House which was to meet Lord Botetourt, no less than 
on other like occasions, of whatever kind the business of 
the Assembly was likely to be. He did not lose his pas- 
sion for fine horse-flesh, either, at the thickest of the 
plot. In 1770 he was with Governor Eden, of North 
Carolina, at the Jockey Club races in Philadelphia, no 
doubt relieved by the news that all but the tea tax had 
been repealed. The next year it was the races in An- 
napolis that claimed him ; and in 1773 Jacky Custis 
held him again at Philadelphia on the same errand. It 
was wholesome to be thus calmly in pursuit of diversion 
in the intervals of trying business. It bespoke a hearty 
life and a fine balance in the man. 

There was one matter to which Washington felt it his 
bounden duty as a soldier and a man of honor to devote 
his time and energies, whether politics pressed or not. 
A grant of two hundred thousand acres of the western 



144 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

lands had been promised by the government of the col- 
ony to those who enlisted for the war against the 
French and Indians in 175i; but nothing had ever been 
done to fulfil the promise, and Washington undertook 
to act as agent for his comrades in the business. In the 
autumn of 1770, accordingly, he turned away for a 
space from the deepening trouble in the east to plunge 
once more into the western ways and search out proper 
tracts for the grant along the reaches of the Ohio. 
'Twas a two-months journey, for he did not stop till 
he had gone close upon three hundred miles beyond 
Fort Pitt. And when he was home again no one in 
the government who could lend a hand in the matter 
got any peace from the stirring, thorough man until 
the business was put finally into shape. There was a 
tidv profit in the grant for himself; for his own share 
was large, and he providently bought, besides, the shares 
of others who were unwilling to spend or co-operate in 
the matter. But there were months upon months of 
weary, unrequited service for his comrades, too, given 
with hearty diligence and without grudging. Their 
portions w T ere as well placed as his own, they were to 
find, when it came to the survey. He came off from 
the business very rich in western lands — buying the 
Great Meadows, among the rest, for memory's sake — 
but richer still in the gratitude and admiration of the 
men for whom he had labored. 

Meanwhile events darkened ominously. A new ad- 
ministration had been formed in England under Lord 
North, and had begun its government by repealing all 
the taxes of 1769 except that on tea. But it was Par- 
liament's right to tax them that the colonists were 
fighting, not the taxes themselves, and one tax was as 



THE HEAT OF POLITICS 145 

hateful as a hundred. The year had been marked in 
sinister fashion, moreover, by a broil between townsmen 
and troops in the streets of Boston, in which arms had 
been used and men slain, and in the heated imaginations 
of the colonists the affair had taken on the ugly aspect 
of a massacre. The year 1771 went quietly enough for 
Virginians. Botetourt was dead, and that good mer- 
chant of York, William Kelson, President of the Coun- 
cil, sat in the place of authority throughout the year. 
Although the whole country refused the taxed tea, the 
attention of the ministers, as it happened, was fixed 
chiefly upon Massachusetts, where trade centred at a 
growing port and opposition had a local habitation. In 
Virginia there was no place to send troops to, unless 
the whole country were occupied, and so long as Mr. 
Nelson was acting Governor, Colonel Washington could 
go without preoccupation to the races, and gentlemen 
everywhere follow their own devices in the quiet coun- 
ties. There was rioting — rebellion, even — in North 
Carolina, so uneasily did affairs go there ; but Governor 
Try on was a soldier as well as a despot, and did not 
need to trouble his neighbors about that. It was not 
until the first months of 1772 that Virginians began to 
read plain signs of change in the face of their new Gov- 
ernor, John Murray, Earl Dunmore — a dark and dis- 
tant man, who seemed to the Virginians to come like a 
satrap to his province, who brought a soldier with him 
for secretary and confidential adviser, set up a fixed 
etiquette to be observed by all who would approach 
him, spoke abruptly and without courtesy, displayed in 
all things an arbitrary temper, and took more interest, 
it presently appeared, in acquiring tracts of western 
land than in conducting the government of the colony. 
10 



X46 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

The year of his coming was marked by the secret de- 
struction of the revenue -schooner Gaspe in Ehode Isl- 
and, and by many significant Haws of temper here and 
there throughout the colonies ; and 1773 saw affairs at 
last come to a crisis. 

Dunmore had summoned the Burgesses to meet him 
upon his first coming, but had liked their proud temper 
as little as they liked his, and was careful not to call 
them together again till March, 1773, though he had 
promised to convene them earlier. There was instant 
trouble. In view of the affair of the Gaspe, Parliament 
had again resolved upon the trial of malcontents in 
England, and the Burgesses were hot at seeing the sen- 
timents of the colonies so flouted. Conservative men 
would still have waited to try events, but their fel- 
low-members of quicker pulse were diligent to disap- 
point them. Leadership fell to those who were bold 
enough to take it ; and Patrick Henry, Richard Henry 
Lee, Dabney Carr, and Thomas Jefferson, radicals all, 
drew together, a self-constituted committee of guidance. 
Evening after evening they met in a private room at 
the Kaleigh, with now and again one or two other like 
spirits called into counsel, to consult what should be 
done. Richard Henry Lee proposed that the colonies 
should be invited to join Virginia in appointing com- 
mittees of correspondence, through which to devise 
steady concert of action, and that Virginia's committee, 
to be appointed at once, should be instructed to look 
into the character of the new court of trial lately estab- 
lished in Rhode Island. Dabney Carr was directed to 
move the resolutions, and the eloquence of Lee and 
Henry won for them an instant and hearty acceptance. 
Dunmore promptly dissolved the Assembly, and Wash- 










R. H. Lee V L. Lee 

IN THE OLD RALEIGH TAVERN 



THE HEAT OF POLITICS 14V 

ington was free to set out for New York to place Jacky 
Custis at King's College, lingering on the way in Phila- 
delphia to see the races, and pick up the talk of the 
hour during half a dozen evenings at the rooms of the 
Jockey Club, at the balls and assemblies of the gay 
town, and at the hospitable tables of his friends. 

The opening of the year had found Washington in a 
very genial humor, his letters touched with pleasantry 
and gossip. " Our celebrated fortune, Miss French, 
whom half the world was in pursuit of," he wrote, in 
February, to Colonel Bassett, " bestowed her hand on 
Wednesday last, being her birthday (you perceive, I 
think myself under a necessity of accounting for the 
choice), on Mr. Ben Dulany, who is to take her to Mary- 
land Mentioning of one wedding puts me in mind 

of another" — and so through the news of Miss More, 
" remarkable for a very frizzled head and good singing," 
and the rest of the neighborhood talk. But the year 
turned out a very sad one for him. He had been scarce- 
ly ten days back from New York when Patsy Custis, 
whom he loved as his own daughter, died. It called 
forth all the latent Christian faith of the thoughtful, 
steadfast man to withstand the shock. And Master 
Jack Custis, the girl's wayward brother, gave him little 
but anxiety. He would not study, for all Washington 
was so solicitous he should have the liberalizing outlook 
of books, and be made " fit for more useful purposes 
than horse-racer," and though he was but twenty, could 
hardly be induced to see the year out at college before 
getting married. 

It was no doubt very well that public affairs of the 
first consequence called Washington's mind imperatively 
off from these private anxieties, which could not but be 



14 8 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

dwarfed in the presence of transactions which threat- 
ened to shake the continent. As the year drew on, the 
government in England undertook to force cargoes of 
the East India Company's tea into the ports. When all 
resisted, and Boston, more forward even than the rest, 
threw three hundred and forty odd chests of tea into 
the harbor, acts passed Parliament giving dangerous in- 
crease of power to the Governor of Massachusetts, and 
directing that Boston port be closed to all commerce on 
and after the first day of June ; and it became evident 
that vigorous action must be taken in response. The 
Burgesses in Virginia (May, 1774) resolved that June 1st 
should be set apart as a day of fasting and prayer- 
prayer that civil war might be averted and the people 
of America united in a common cause. Again Dun- 
more dissolved them ; but they gathered in the long 
room of the Raleigh tavern, and there resolved to urge 
a congress of all the colonies, and to call a convention 
for Virginia to meet at that place on the first day of 
August to take action for the colony. They showed no 
spleen towards the Governor. Washington dined with 
him the very day of the dissolution, spent the evening 
at the palace, even rode out with him to his farm on 
the following morning and breakfasted there ; and the 
Burgesses did not fail to give the ball they had planned 
in honor of Lady Dunmore and her daughters on the 
evening of the day they had held their meeting in the 
" Appolo room" at the Kaleigh. But there were fast- 
ing and prayer on the 1st of June ; the convention met 
on the first day of August ; very outspoken resolutions 
were adopted ; and Peyton Randolph, Kichard Henry 
Lee, Patrick Henry, Richard Bland, Edmund Pendle- 
ton, George Washington, and Benjamin Harrison were 



THE HEAT OF POLITICS 



149 



directed to attend the congress of the colonies appointed 
to meet in Philadelphia on the fifth day of September. 
When the time came for the journey, Henry and Pen- 
dleton joined Washington at Mount Yernon. It must 
have been with many grave thoughts that the three 
companions got to horse and turned to ride through the 
long August day towards the north. 




PILOTING A REVOLUTION 



CHAPTER VI 

In the congress of 1774 the leaders of Virginia were 
for the first time brought into face-to-face conference 
with the men of the other colonies. In 1765 Fauquier 
had dissolved the Burgesses with such sharp despatch, 
upon the passage of Mr. Henry's resolutions, that they 
were all gone home before the call for a congress to act 
upon the stamp duties could reach them. But in 1774 
they were not to be so cheated. They had themselves 
issued the call for a congress this time, and dissolution 
could not drive them home. Their leaders could at 
least linger at the Raleigh and concert means to have 
their way, House or no House. A convention took the 
place of the Assembly ; and seven leading members of 
the House were sent to Philadelphia, with as full au- 
thority to speak and act for the colony as if the Bur- 
gesses themselves had commissioned them. Mr. Har- 
rison declared in Philadelphia that "he would have 
come on foot rather than not come"; and quiet Eich- 
ard Bland, that " he would have gone if it had been to 
Jericho." Colonel Harrison struck his new colleagues 
from the North as a bit rough in his free Southern 
speech and manner ; and Mr. Bland seemed to them " a 
plain, sensible man," such as would be more given to 
study than to agitation. If such men, artless and 
steady as any downright country gentleman of old 



154 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

England, held so high a fancy for the business of the 
congress, it was easy to conclude what the hastier, 
younger men would be likely to plan and do ; and 
the Massachusetts delegates found themselves greatly 
heartened. 

John Adams, Thomas Cushing, Samuel Adams, and 
Kobert Treat Paine were the representatives of Massa- 
chusetts. It was their people who had most provoked 
Parliament to be high-handed and aggressive. The 
struggle with the ministry at home had taken shape in 
Boston. It had come to actual riot there. All the 
continent and all England had seen how stubborn was 
the temper, how incorrigible the spirit of resistance, in 
that old seat of the Puritan power, always hard set and 
proud in its self-willed resolution to be independent; 
and all eyes were turned now upon Cushing and Paine 
and this "brace of Adamses," who had come, it was 
thought, to hurry the congress into radical courses. 
Kindness, applause, hospitality, "studied and expensive 
respect," had attended them at every stage of their long 
ride from Boston to Philadelphia. The country was 
much stirred by the prospect of a general " congress of 
committees" at Philadelphia; and the delegates from 
Massachusetts were greeted as they passed even more 
generously than the rest, because their people had been 
the first to suffer in this bad business ; because their 
chief port at Boston was closed, and red-coated sentries 
were on their streets. It behooved the Massachusetts 
men, however, not to suffer themselves to be misled. 
Many looked upon them askance; some distrusted them 
heartily. Their own hot-headed mob had provoked the 
"massacre," of which they made so much. They had 
wantonly destroyed private property when they threw 



PILOTING A REVOLUTION I55 

the tea into their harbor to show the government their 
spirit. There had been more than a touch of violence, 
more than a little turbulence, and a vast deal of radical 
and revolutionary talk in all that they had done; and 
the colonies were full yet of men who had no tolerance 
for anything that transgressed, were it never so little, 
the moderate limits of constitutional agitation. " There 
is an opinion which does in some degree obtain in the 
other colonies that the Massachusetts gentlemen, and 
especially of the town of Boston, do affect to dictate 
and take the lead in continental measures ; that we are 
apt, from an inward vanity and self-conceit, to assume 
big and haughty airs," said Joseph Hawley, who, for 
all he had grown old as a quiet Massachusetts lawyer 
among his neighbors, had kept his shrewd eyes abroad. 
"It is highly probable," he told John Adams, with a 
wholesome bluntness, " that you will meet gentlemen 
from several of the other colonies fully equal to your- 
selves or any of you in their knowledge of Great Brit- 
ain, the colonies, law, history, government, commerce. 
. . . By what we from time to time see in the public 
papers, and what our Assembly and committees have 
received from the Assemblies and committees of the 
more southern colonies, we must be satisfied that they 
have men of as much sense and literature as any we 
can, or ever could, boast of." It was mere counsel of 
prudence that they should play their part in the con- 
gress with modesty and discretion. 

Not Cushing and Paine, but the Adamses, carried the 
strength of the Massachusetts delegation ; and it was 
Samuel Adams, rather than John, who was just now 
the effective master in the great Bay Colony — "master 
of puppets," his enemies called him. Hale, bluff, adroit, 



15 6 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

plain, a man of the people, he had grown old in the 
business of agitation. Fifty-two years he had lived, 
planning always for others, never for himself. He had 
" never looked forward in his life," he frankly said ; 
" never planned, laid a scheme, or framed a design of 
laying up anything for himself or others after him"; 
had let all his private business go neglected, and lived 
upon the petty salary of a small public office, the indul- 
gence of fortune, and the good offices of the friends and 
neighbors who loved him. He was in Philadelphia now 
wearing the plain suit and spending the modest purse 
with which his friends and partisans had fitted him out 
— the very impersonation of the revolution men were 
beginning so to fear. No man had ever daunted him ; 
neither could any corrupt him. He was possessed with 
the instinct of agitation : led the people, not the leaders ; 
cared not for place, but only for power; showed a mas- 
tery of means, a self-containment, a capacity for timely 
and telling speech, that marked him a statesman, though 
he loved the rough ways of a people's government, and 
preferred the fierce democracy of the town meeting to 
the sober dignity of senates. Like an eagle in his high 
building and strength of audacious flight, but in instinct 
and habit a bird of the storm. Not over-nice what he 
did, not too scrupulous what he devised, he was yet not 
selfish, loved the principles he had given his life to, and 
spent himself without limit to see them triumph. 

John Adams, his cousin, was of a very different mould : 
a younger man by thirteen years ; no man of the people, 
but with a taste rather for the exclusive claims of edu- 
cation and breeding; self -regardful ; a thought too cal- 
culating; too quick-witted to be patient with dull men, 
too self-conscious to be at ease with great ones ; and yet 



PILOTING A REVOLUTION 157 

public-spirited withal, and generous in action if not in 
judgment ; of great powers, if only he could manage 
to use them without jealousy. Samuel Adams thought 
only of his end, not of himself; seldom spoke of himself, 
indeed ; seemed a sort of subtle engine for the people's 
business. John Adams thought of himself always, and 
yet mastered himself to play a great part with the no- 
bility of a man of genius, if not with the grace of a man 
of modesty and self-forgetful devotion. For the time he 
could even hold back with his wily cousin, resign leader- 
ship in the congress to Virginia, and act in all things 
the wise part of those who follow. 

It was a circumstance full of peril that the delegates 
of the several colonies should at such a juncture be 
strangers to one another, and provincials all, nowhere 
bred to continental affairs. Only since the passage of 
the Stamp Act had they taken any thought for each 
other. There was no assurance that even the best lead- 
ers of a colony could rise to the statesman's view and 
concert measures to insure the peace of an empire. 
Eising lawyers like John Adams, brusque planters like 
Colonel Harrison, well-to-do merchants like Thomas 
Mifflin, might bring all honesty and good intention to 
the task and yet miserably fail. A provincial law prac- 
tice, the easy ascendency of a provincial country gentle- 
man, the narrow round of provincial trade, might afford 
capable men opportunity to become enlightened citizens, 
but hardly fitted them to be statesmen. The real first 
business of the delegates was to become acquainted, and 
to learn how to live in the foreign parts to which most 
of them had come. There was a continual round of en- 
tertainment in the hospitable town, therefore, a univer- 
sal exchange of courtesies, a rush of visiting and dining, 



158 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

a flow of excellent wine, a rich abundance of good cheer, 
such as for a while made the occasion seem one of fes- 
tivity rather than of anxious counsel. Many of the dele- 
gates had come to town a week or more before the date 
set for the congress, and had settled to an acquaintance 
before it was time to effect an organization ; but the 
gentlemen from Maryland and Virginia, more familiar 
with the journey, arrived almost upon the day. They 
made an instant impression upon their new colleagues. 
John Adams promptly declared them " the most spirited 
and consistent of any," and deemed Mr. Lee particularly 
"a masterly man." Joseph Hawley's prediction was 
fulfilled. "The Virginia and indeed all the Southern 
delegates appear like men of importance," said Silas 
Deane ; " I never met, nor scarcely had an idea of meet- 
ing, with men of such firmness, sensibility, spirit, and 
thorough knowledge of the interests of America." Mr. 
Lynch of South Carolina, though he wore " the manu- 
facture of this country," and was in all things "plain, 
sensible, above ceremony," seemed to Mr. Deane to carry 
with him " more force in his very appearance than most 
powdered folks in their conversation." 

The high bearing and capacity of the Southern dele- 
gates came upon the New England men like a great sur- 
prise: where they had expected to see rustic squires 
they found men of elegance and learning. But there 
was, in fact, no good reason to wonder at the natural 
leadership of these men. Their life had bred them more 
liberally than others. It required a much more various 
capacity and knowledge of the world to administer a 
great property and live the life of a local magnate in the 
South than sufficed to put a man at the front of trade or 
of legal practice in Boston or New York or Philadelphia. 



PILOTING A REVOLUTION 159 

The Southern colonies, besides, had lived more in sym- 
pathy with the life of the empire than had their North- 
ern neighbors. Their life had depended directly upon 
that of England hitherto, and had partaken of it with 
a constant zest. They had no rival trade; they had 
wanted no rival government. The general air of the 
wide empire had blown in all ordinary seasons through 
their affairs, and they had cultivated none of that shrewd 
antagonism towards the home government which had so 
sharpened the wits and narrowed the political interests 
of the best men in New England. They had read law 
because they were men of business, without caring too 
much about its niceties or meaning to practise it in liti- 
gation. They had read their English history without 
feeling that they were separate from it. Their passion 
for freedom was born not of local feeling so much as of 
personal pride and the spirit of those who love old prac- 
tices and the just exemptions of an ancient constitution. 
It was the life they had lived, and the conceptions of 
personal dignity and immemorial privilege that had gone 
always with it, that gave them so striking an air of mas- 
tery. It was not simply because the Massachusetts dele- 
gates kept themselves prudently in the background and 
the rest yielded to her pretensions that Virginia was ac- 
corded primacy in the congress : it was also because her 
representatives were men to whom power naturally fell, 
and because she had won so honorable a place of leader- 
ship already in the common affairs of the continent. 

Colonel Washington, striking and forceable man 
though he was, did not figure as a leader among the 
Virginian delegates. Peyton Randolph was elected 
president of the congress ; Richard Henry Lee and Pat- 
rick Henry stood forth as the Virginian leaders on the 



160 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

floor. "If you speak of solid information and sound 
judgment, Colonel Washington is unquestionably the 
greatest man on that floor," was Henry's confident and 
generous verdict ; but Washington was no politician, 
and did not stand in exactly the same class with the 
rest. He had headed committees and presided over 
popular meetings among his own neighbors in Fairfax, 
and had been prompt to join them in speaking with 
high spirit against the course of the ministry in Eng- 
land. He had been forward in urging and punctiliously 
careful in practising non-importation. He had declared 
Gage's conduct in Boston " more becoming a Turkish 
bashaw than an English governor." But he was a man 
of action rather than of parliaments. " I will raise one 
thousand men, enlist them at my own expense, and 
march myself at their head for the relief of Boston," 
had been his impetuous utterance in the Virginian con- 
vention — " the most eloquent speech that ever was 
made," Mr. Lynch declared. " I have heard he said," 
reported an admiring Philadelphian — " I have heard he 
said he wished to God the liberties of America were to 
be determined by a single combat between himself and 
George!" But his fellow Virginians understood him 
better. They had chosen him for force and sobriety ; 
not as an orator, but as the first soldier and one of the 
first characters of the commonwealth ; and he had made 
the impression they expected. He had not been put upon 
their committee of correspondence, or been appointed 
with Nicholas and Pendleton and Lee and Henry to 
draw resolutions and remonstrances; but when it came 
to choosing those who should represent the Old Do- 
minion in the congress, but two names stood before 
his in the vote. Peyton Eandolph, 104; Iiichard Henry 



PILOTING A REVOLUTION 161 

Lee, 100; George Washington, 9S ; Patrick Henry, 89 ; 
Kichard Bland, 79 ; Benjamin Harrison, 66 ; Edmund 
Pendleton, 62 — such had been the preference of the con- 
vention. The Northern delegates admired his "easy, 
soldier-like air and gesture" and his modest and "cool 
but determined " style and accent when he spoke ; and 
wondered to see him look scarce forty, when they re- 
called how his name had gone through the colonies 
twenty years ago, when he had met the French so gal- 
lantly at Great Meadows, and with Braddock at the 
forks of the Ohio. 

The Massachusetts delegates had reason to admire 
his manly openness, too, and straightforward candor. 
An old comrade in arms whom he esteemed — a Virgin- 
ian now in regular commission, and stationed with the 
troops in Boston — had written him very damaging 
things about the " patriot " leaders of the beset town ; 
of their "tyrannical oppression over one another," and 
" their fixed aim at total independence," and had charged 
them roundly with being no better than demagogues 
and rebels. Washington went at once to the men ac- 
cused, to learn from their own lips their principles and 
intentions, taking Bicharcl Henry Lee and discreet Dr. 
Shippen along with him as his sponsors and witnesses. 
" Spent the evening at home with Colonel Lee, Colonel 
Washington, and Dr. Shippen, who came in to consult 
us," was John Adams's entry in his diary for September 
28th. No doubt Samuel Adams found the interview a 
trying one, and winced a little under the examination of 
the calm and steady soldier, going so straight to the 
point, for all his Virginian ceremony. There had been 
many outward signs of the demagogue in Adams's career. 
He had been consciously and deliberately planning and 
li 



162 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

scheming for independence ever since 1768, and had 
made public avowal of his purpose no longer ago than 
last year. It must have taxed even his adroit powers 
to convince these frank Virginians that his purpose was 
not rebellion, but liberty ; that he venerated what they 
venerated, and wished only what they wished. But the 
truth somehow lay open before the evening was gone. 
There was frank cordiality in the parting: Washing- 
ton was convinced of their genuineness and sobriety. 
" Though you are led to believe by venal men," he re- 
plied to Captain Mackenzie, " that the people of Massa- 
chusetts are rebellious, setting up for independency, 
and what not, give me leave, my good friend, to tell you 
that you are abused, grossly abused. This I advance 
with a degree of confidence and boldness which may 
claim your belief, having better opportunities for know- 
ing the real sentiments of the people you are among, 
from the leaders of them, in opposition to the present 
measures of the administration, than you have from 
those whose business it is not to disclose truths, but to 
misrepresent facts in order to justify as much as possi- 
ble to the world their own conduct." 

The Massachusetts men had come to a better under- 
standing of the game— began to see how cautiously it 
must be played, how slowly and how wisely. It was a 
critical business, this of drawing all the colonies into a 
common congress, as if to create a directing body for 
the continent, without constitution or warrant. The 
establishment of committees of correspondence had 
seemed little short of seditious, for it was notorious the 
committees were formed to concert action against the 
government at home; but this "congress of commit- 

Would the 



PILOTING A REVOLUTION 163 

colonies venture a continental organization to defy Par- 
liament ? Dangerous differences of opinion were blown 
hot between neighbors by such measures. Some of the 
best men in America were opposed to the course which 
was now evidently to be taken. So long as it was 
merely a matter of protest by the colonies severally, 
they had no criticism to make — except perhaps that 
Mr. Otis and Mr. Henry had held unnecessarily high 
language, and had been bold and defiant beyond meas- 
ure ; but when they saw how the opposition gathered 
head, hastened from protest to concerted resistance, put 
popular conventions into the place of lawful legislative 
assemblies, and advanced at length to a continental or- 
ganization, they deemed it high time to bestir them- 
selves, vindicate their loyalty to his Majesty's govern- 
ment, and avert a revolution. They were not men to 
be trifled with. Had they been able to unite upon ac- 
tive measures, had they advanced from defence to ag- 
gressive action, they might have rendered themselves 
formidable beyond possibility of defeat. Everywhere 
men of substance and of influence were to be found by 
the score who were opposed to a revolutionary agita- 
tion, such as this that now seemed to be gathering head. 
Even in Massachusetts men who bore the best and the 
oldest names of the commonwealth were of this num- 
ber; in New York and Pennsylvania, at the very heart 
of the continent, they could, it was believed, boast a 
majority, as well as to the far southward, in the low 
country of South Carolina and Georgia. No one, they 
declared, but designing politicians and men without 
property, those who had much to gain and nothing to 
lose by the upsetting of law and ordered government, 
wished to see this contest with the ministry pushed to 



164 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

extremes. They wished no less than others to see the 
colonies keep their lawful and chartered liberties, but 
the thing must be accomplished soberly, and without 
loss of things equally dear — of honor, and the mainten- 
ance of an unbroken English Empire. 

The nice balance of parties was disclosed in the con- 
gress itself. The Pennsylvanian delegation was led by 
Joseph Galloway, a man in the prime of life, full of 
force and learning, who had been Speaker of the pro- 
vincial House these eight years by the almost unani- 
mous choice of his colleagues, and who now stood forth 
to utter the real voice of his colony in proposing meas- 
ures of accommodation. He proposed that the home 
government be asked to sanction the establishment of a 
confederate parliament for America, composed of dele- 
gates to be chosen every third year by the legislatures 
of the several colonies, and acting under a governor- 
general to be appointed by the crown. Edward Eut- 
ledge, of South Carolina, hot orator for liberty though 
he was, declared it an " almost perfect plan," and was 
eager to see it adopted ; influential members from 
almost every quarter gave it their hearty support, 
Mr. John Jay, of New York, among the rest ; and it 
was defeated only by the narrow majority of a single 
colony's vote. Chatham might very justly commend 
the congress of 1774 as conspicuous among deliberative 
bodies for its "decency, firmness, and wisdom," its "so- 
lidity of reasoning, force of sagacity, and wisdom of 
conclusion, under such a complication of circumstances," 
for the complication of circumstances was such as even 
he did not fully comprehend. Eor seven weeks of al- 
most continuous session did it hammer its stiff business 
into shape, never wearying of deliberation or debate, till 



PILOTING A REVOLUTION 165 

it could put forth papers to the world — an address to 
the King, memorials to the people of Great Britain and 
to the people of British America, their fellow-subjects, 
and a solemn declaration of rights — which should mark 
it no revolutionary body, but a congress of just and 
thoughtful Englishmen, in love, not with license or re- 
bellion, but with right and wholesome liberty. Their 
only act of aggression was the formation of an "Amer- 
ican Association" pledged against trade with Great 
Britain till the legislation of which they complained 
should be repealed. Their only intimation of intention 
for the future was a resolution to meet again the next 
spring, should their prayers not meanwhile be heeded. 

Washington turned homeward from the congress 
with thoughts and purposes every way deepened and 
matured. It had been a mere seven weeks' conference ; 
no one had deemed the congress a government, or had 
spoken of any object save peace and accommodation ; 
but no one could foresee the issue of what had been 
done. A spirit had run through those deliberations 
which gave thoughtful men, as they pondered it, a new 
idea of the colonies. It needed no prophet to discern 
beyond all this sober and anxious business a vision 
of America united, armed, belligerent for her rights. 
There was no telling what form of scornful rejection 
awaited that declaration of rights or the grave plead- 
ing of that urgent memorial to the crown. It behooved 
every man to hold himself in readiness for the worst; 
and Washington saw as clearly as any man at how nice 
a hazard things stood. He had too frank a judgment 
upon affairs to cheat himself with false hopes. "An 
innate spirit of freedom first told me that the measures 
which administration hath for some time been and now 



166 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

are most violently pursuing are repugnant to every prin- 
ciple of natural justice," had been his earnest language 
to Bryan Fairfax ere he set out for the congress ; 
" whilst much abler heads than my own hath fully con- 
vinced me that it is not only repugnant to natural right, 
but subversive of the laws and constitution of Great 
Britain itself, in the establishment of which some of 
the best blood of the kingdom hath been spilt. ... I 
could wish, I own," he had added, "that this dispute 
had been left to posterity to determine"; but he knew 
more clearly than ever before, as he rode homeward 
from the congress through the autumn woods, that it 
had not been ; that Lee and Henry and Mason were 
rightly of the same mind and purpose with the men 
from Massachusetts ; that conference had only united 
and heartened those who stood for liberty in every col- 
ony ; that there could be no compromise — perhaps no 
yielding either — and that every man must now take his 
soberest resolution for the times to come. 

He turned steadily to his private business for the 
winter, nevertheless, as was his wont — pushed forward 
the preparation and settlement of his western lands, 
and stood guard, as before, over the soldiers' grants 
upon the Ohio, against official bad faith and negligence. 
" For a year or two past there has been scarce a mo- 
ment that I could properly call my own," he declared 
to a friend who solicited his promise to act as guardian 
to his son. " What with my own business, my present 
ward's, my mother's, which is wholly in my hands, 
Colonel Fairfax's, Colonel Mercer's, and the little assist- 
ance I have undertaken to give in the management of 
my brother Augustine's concerns, together with the 
share I take in public affairs, I have been constantly 



PILOTING A REVOLUTION 167 

engaged in writing letters, settling accounts, and nego- 
tiating one piece of business or another ; by which means 
I have really been deprived of every kind of enjoyment, 
and had almost fully resolved to engage in no fresh mat- 
ter till I had entirely wound up the old." He promised 
to undertake the new charge, nevertheless. It was 
stuff of his nature to spend himself thus, and keep his 
powers stretched always to a great compass. 

With the new year (1775) public affairs loomed big 
again, and ominous. The petitions of the congress at 
Philadelphia had been received in England almost with 
contempt. Chatham, indeed, with that broad and no- 
ble sagacity which made him so great a statesman, had 
proposed that America's demands should be met, to the 
utmost length of repeal and withdrawal of menace, and 
that she should be accorded to the full the self-govern- 
ment she demanded in respect of taxation and every 
domestic concern. " It is not cancelling a piece of parch- 
ment," he cried, "that can win back America," the old 
fire burning hot within him; "you must respect her 
fears and her resentments." The merchants, too, in fear 
for their trade, urged very anxiously that there should 
be instant and ample concession. But the King's stub- 
born anger, the Parliament's indifference, the ministry's 
incapacity, made it impossible anything wise or gener- 
ous should be done. Instead of real concession there 
was fresh menace. The ministry did, indeed, offer to 
exempt from taxation every colony that would promise 
that by its own vote it would make proper contribution 
to the expenses of public defence and imperial adminis- 
tration — in the hope thereby to disengage the luke- 
warm middle colonies from the plot now thickening 
against the government. But Massachusetts was at 



168 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

once proclaimed in rebellion, every port in New Eng- 
land was declared closed against trade, New England 
fishermen were denied access to the Newfoundland fish- 
eries, and ten thousand fresh troops were ordered to 
Boston. Neither the pleas of their friends nor the 
threats of their enemies reached the ears of the colo- 
nists promptly from over sea that portentous spring; 
but they were not slow to perceive that they must 
look for no concessions; and they did not wait upon 
Parliament in their preparation for a doubtful future. 
Upon the very day the " congress of committees " at 
Philadelphia adjourned, a "provincial congress" in 
Massachusetts, formed of its own authority in the stead 
of the House of Delegates the Governor had but just 
now dissolved, had voted to organize and equip the 
militia of the colony and to collect stores and arms. 
Virginia had been equally bold, and almost equally 
prompt, far away as she seemed from the King's troops 
at Boston. By the end of January Charles Lee could 
write from Williamsburg: "The whole country is full 
of soldiers, all furnished, all in arms. . . . Never was 
such vigor and concord heard of, not a single traitor, 
scarcely a silent dissentient." 

" Every county is now arming a company of men for 
the avowed purpose of protecting their committees," 
Dunmore had reported to the ministry before the year 
1774 was out, " and to be employed against government 
if occasion require. As to the power of government 
which your lordship directs should be exerted to coun- 
teract the dangerous measures pursuing here, I can as- 
sure your lordship that it is entirely disregarded, if not 
wholly overturned. There is not a justice of peace in 
Virginia that acts except as a committeeman ; the abol- 



PILOTING A REVOLUTION 169 

ishing of courts of justice was the first step taken, in 
which the men of fortune and pre-eminence joined 
equally with the lowest and meanest." Company after 
company, as it formed, asked Colonel Washington to 
assume command over it, not only in his own county of 
Fairfax, but in counties also at a distance — and he ac- 
cepted the responsibility as often as it was offered to 
him. "It is my full intention," he said, simply, "to 
devote my life and fortune to the cause we are engaged 
in, if needful" ; and he had little doubt any longer what 
was to come. He found time, even that stirring year, 
to quicken his blood once and again, nevertheless, while 
winter held, by a run with the hounds : for he was not 
turned politician so sternly even yet as to throw away 
his leisure upon anything less wholesome than the hale 
sport he loved. 

On the 20th of May. 1775, the second Virginian con- 
vention met, not in Williamsburg, but at Richmond, 
and its chief business was the arming of the colony. 
Maryland had furnished the ironical formula with which 
to justify what was to be done: "Resolved, unanimous- 
ly, that a well-regulated militia, composed of the gen- 
tlemen freeholders and other freemen, is the natural 
strength and only stable security of a free government ; 
and that such militia will relieve our mother- country 
from any expense in our protection and defence, will 
obviate the pretence of a necessity for taxing us on that 
account, and render it unnecessary to keep any standing 
army — ever dangerous to liberty — in this province." 
Mr. Henry accepted the formula with great relish, in 
the convention at Richmond, in his resolution "that the 
colony be immediately put into a posture of defence," 
but he broke with it in the speech with which he sup- 



170 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

ported his measures of preparation. In that there was 
no plan or pretence of peace, but, instead, a plain dec- 
laration of war. Once more did Edmund Pendleton, 
Richard Bland, Mr. Nicholas, and Colonel Harrison 
spring to their feet to check him, as in the old days of 
the Stamp Act. Once more, nevertheless, did he have 
his way, completely, triumphantly. What he had pro- 
posed was done, and his very opponents served upon 
the committee charged with its accomplishment. It 
was not doing more than other colonies had done ; it 
was only saying more ; it was only dealing more fear- 
lessly and frankly with fortune. Even slow, conserva- 
tive men like John Dickinson, of Pennsylvania, shielded 
themselves behind only an " if." " The first act of vio- 
lence on the part of administration in America," they 
knew, " or the attempt to reinforce General Gage this 
winter or next year, will put the whole continent in 
arms, from Nova Scotia to Georgia." 

What they feared very speedily came to pass. 'Twas 
hardly four weeks from the clay Mr. Henry proclaimed 
a state of war in the convention at Richmond before 
the King's regulars were set upon at Lexington and 
Concord and driven back in rout to their quarters by 
the swarming militia-men of Massachusetts. On the 
19th of April they had set out across a peaceful country 
to seize the military stores placed at Concord. Before 
the day was out they had been fairly thrown back into 
Boston, close upon three hundred of their comrades 
gone to a last reckoning; and the next morning dis- 
closed a rapidly growing provincial army drawn in 
threatened siege about them. In the darkness of that 
very night (April 20th), at the command of Dun more, 
a force of marines was landed from an armed sloop that 



PILOTING A REVOLUTION 171 

lay in James River, in Virginia, to seize the gunpowder 
stored at Williamsburg. The Virginians in their turn 
sprang to arms, and Dun more was forced, ere he could 
rid himself of the business, to pay for the powder taken 
— pay Captain Patrick Henry, at the head of a body of 
militia under arms. 

On the 10th of May the second Continental Congress 
met at Philadelphia, with business to transact vastly 
different from that to which the first "congress of com- 
mittees" had addressed itself — not protests and re- 
solves, but quick and efficient action. The very day it 
met, a body of daring provincials under Ethan Allen 
had walked into the open gates at Ticonderoga and 
taken possession of the stout fortress "in the name of 
the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress " ; and 



two days later a similar exploit secured Crown Point to 
the insurgents. Active war had begun ; an army was 
set down before Boston — a rude army that had grown 
to be sixteen thousand strong within the first week of 
its rally ; the country was united in a general resistance, 
and looked to the congress to give it organization and 
guidance. Colonel Washington had come to the con- 
gress in his provincial uniform, and found himself a 
oreat deal sought after in its committees. Not onlv 
the drawing of state papers which would once more 
justify their cause and their resort to arms in the eyes 
of the world, but the actual mustering and equipment 
of an army, quick fortification, the gathering of muni- 
tions and supplies, the raising of money and the organ- 
ization of a commissariat, the restraint of the Indians 
upon the frontier, was the business in hand, and Wash- 
ington's advice was invaluable when such matters were 
afoot. He showed no hesitation as to what should be 



172 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

done. II is own mind had long ago been made up ; and the 
sessions of the congress were not ended before Virginia 
was committed beyond all possibility of drawing back. 
The 1st of June saw her last House of Burgesses con- 
vene ; for by the 8th of the month Dunmore was a 
fugitive — had seen the anger of a Williamsburg mob 
blaze hot against him, and had taken refuge upon a 
man-of-war lying in the river. The province was in 
revolution, and Washington was ready to go with it. 

It meant more than he thought that he had come to 
Philadelphia habited like a soldier. It had not been his 
purpose to draw all eyes upon him: it was merely his 
instinctive expression of his own personal feeling with 
regard to the crisis that had come. But it was in its 
way a fulfilment of prophecy. When the first Virgin- 
ian convention chose delegates to attend the congress 
of 1774, "some of the tickets on the ballot assigned 
reasons for the choice expressed in them. Randolph 
should preside in congress ; Lee and Henry should dis- 
play the different kinds of eloquence for which they 
Avere renowned ; Washington should command the 
army, if an army should be raised ; Bland should open 
the treasures of ancient colonial learning; Harrison 
should utter plain truths ; and Pendleton should be the 
penman for business." No wonder the gentlemen from 
Virginia, coming with such confidence to the congress, 
made the instant impression they did for mastery and 
self -poise! "There are some fine fellows come from 
Virginia," Joseph Peed had reported, "but they are 
very high. We understand they are the capital men of 
the colony." Washington alone awaited his cue. Now 
he was to get it, without expecting it. The irregular 
army swarming before Boston was without standing or 



PILOTING A REVOLUTION 173 

government. It had run hastily together out of four 
colonies ; was subject to no common authority ; hardly 
knew what allegiance it bore; might fall to pieces un- 
less it were adequately commanded. The congress in 
Philadelphia was called upon to recognize and adopt it, 
give it leave and authority to act for all the colonies, 
give it a commander, and summon the whole country 
to recruit it. There was an obvious political necessity 
that the thing should be done, and done promptly. 
Massachusetts did not wish to stand alone ; New Eng- 
land wanted the active assistance of the other colonies ; 
something must be attempted to secure common action. 
The first thing to do was to choose an acceptable and 
efficient leader, and to choose him outside New England. 
To John Adams the choice seemed simple enough. 
There was no soldier in America, outside New England 
— nor inside either — to be compared, whether in ex- 
perience or distinction, with Washington, the gallant, 
straightforward, earnest Virginian he had learned so to 
esteem and trust there in Philadelphia, lie accordingly 
moved that congress " adopt the army at Cambridge," 
and declared that he had " but one gentleman in mind " 
for its command — "a gentleman from Virginia, who 
was among us," he said, " and very well known to all of 
us ; a gentleman whose skill and experience as an officer, 
whose independent fortune, great talents, and excellent 
universal character, would command the approbation of 
all America, and unite the cordial exertions of all the 
colonies better than any other person in the union." 
Washington, taken unawares, rose and slipped in con- 
fusion from the room. Some of his own friends doubt- 
ed the expediency of putting a Virginian at the head 
of a New England army, but the more clear-sighted 



174 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

among the New-Englanders did not, and the selection 
was made, after a little hesitation, unanimously. 

Washington accepted his commission with that mix- 
ture of modesty and pride that made men love and hon- 
or him. " You may believe me, my dear Patsy," were 
his simple words to his wife, " when I assure you in 
the most solemn manner, that, so far from seeking this 
appointment, 1 have used every endeavor in my power 
to avoid it, not only from my unwillingness to part 
with you and the family, but from a consciousness of 
its being a trust too great for my capacity. . . . But as 
it has been a kind of destiny that has thrown me upon 
this service, I shall hope that my undertaking it is de- 
signed to answer some good purpose. ... It was ut- 
terly out of my power to refuse this appointment, with- 
out exposing my character to such censures as would 
have reflected dishonor upon myself and given pain to 
my friends." He spoke in the same tone to the con- 
gress. " I beg it ma} 7 be remembered," he said, " by 
every gentleman in this room, that I this day declare 
with the utmost sincerity I do not think myself equal 
to the command I am honored with." His commission 
was signed on the 19th of June ; on the 21st he was on 
the road to the north — the road he had travelled twenty 
years ago to consult with Governor Shirley in Boston 
upon questions of rank, and to fall into Mary Philipse's 
snare by the way ; the road he had ridden after the 
races, but three years ago, to put Jacky Custis at college 
in New York. " There is something charming to me 
in the conduct of Washington," exclaimed John Adams; 
and it was wholesome for the whole country that such 
a man should be put at the head of* affairs. Many ig- 
noble things were being done in the name of liberty, 



PILOTING A REVOLUTION 175 

and an ugly tyranny had been brought to every man's 
•door — "the tyranny of his next-door neighbor." There 
were men by the score in the colonies who had no taste 
or sympathy for the rebellion they now saw afoot — 
common men who knew little or nothing of the mother- 
country, as well as gentlemen of culture who loved her 
traditions and revered her crown ; farmers and village 
lawyers, as well as merchants at the ports who saw 
their living gone and ruin staring them in the face. 
But the local committees and the " Sons of Liberty " 
everywhere saw to it that such men should know and 
dread and fearfully submit to the views of the majority. 
Government was suspended : there was nowhere so 
much as a justice of the peace acting under the authority 
of the crown. There might have been universal license 
had the rabble not seen their leaders so noble, so bent 
upon high and honorable purposes. It was an object- 
lesson in the character of the revolution to see Wash- 
ington ride through the colonies to take charge of an 
insurgent army. And no man or woman, or child even, 
was likely to miss the lesson. That noble figure drew 
all eyes to it ; that mien as if the man were a prince ; that 
sincere and open countenance, which every man could see 
was lighted by a good conscience; that cordial ease in 
salute, as of a man who felt himself brother to his friends. 
There was something about Washington that quickened 
the pulses of a crowd at the same time that it awed them, 
that drew cheers which were a sort of voice of worship. 
Children desired sight of him, and men felt lifted after 
he had passed. It was good to have such a man ride all 
the open way from Philadelphia to Cambridge in sight 
of the people to assume command of the people's army. 
It gave character to the thoughts of all who saw him. 



GENERAL WASHINGTON 



CHAPTER VII 

Matters had not stood still before Boston to await a 
commander sent by congress. While Washington waited 
for his commission and made ready for his journey 
there had been lighting done which was to simplify his 
task. General William Howe had reached Boston with 
reinforcements on the 25th of May, and quite ten thou- 
sand troops held the city, while a strong fleet of men- 
of-war lay watchfully in the harbor. There was no 
hurry, it seemed, about attacking the sixteen thousand 
raw provincials, whose long lines were drawn loosely 
about the town from Charlestown Neck to Jamaica Plain. 
But commanding hills looked across the water on either 
hand — in Charlestown on the north and in Dorchester 
on the southeast — and it would be well, Howe saw, to 
secure them, lest they should be occupied by the insur- 
gents. On the morning of the 17th of June, however, 
while leisurely preparations were a-making in Boston 
to occupy the hills of Charlestown, it was discovered 
that the provincials had been beforehand in the project. 
There they were in the clear sun, working diligently at 
redoubts of their own upon th e height. Three thousand 
men were put across the water to drive them off. 
Though they mustered only seventeen hundred behind 
their unfinished works, three several assaults and the 
loss of a thousand men was the cost of dislodging them. 



180 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

They withheld their fire till the redcoats were within 
fifty — nay, thirty — yards of them, and then poured out 
a deadly, blazing fire which no man could face and live. 
They were ousted only when they failed of powder and 
despaired of reinforcements. Veteran officers who had 
led the assault declared the regulars of France were not 
more formidable than these militia-men, whom they had 
despised as raw peasants. There was no desire to buy 
another American position at that price ; and Washing- 
ton had time enough for the complimentary receptions 
and addresses and the elaborate parade of escort and 
review that delayed his journey to headquarters. 

He reached Cambridge on the 2d of July, and bore 
himself with so straightforward and engaging a courte- 
sy in taking command that the officers he superseded 
could not but like him: jealousy was disarmed. But 
he found neither the preparations nor the spirit of the 
army to his liking. His soldierly sense of order was 
shocked by the loose discipline, and his instinct of com- 
mand by the free and easy insolence of that irregular 
levy ; and his authority grew stern as he labored to 
bring the motley host to order and effective organiza- 
tion. " The people of this government have obtained a 
character," his confidential letters declared, " which they 
by no means deserved — their officers, generally speak- 
ing, are the most indifferent kind of people I ever saw. 
I dare say the men would fight very well (if properly 
officered), although they are an exceedingly dirty and 
nasty people. ... It is among the most difficult tasks 
I ever undertook in my life to induce these people to 
believe that there is, or can be, danger till the bayonet 
is pushed at their breasts. Not that it proceeds from 
any uncommon prowess, but rather from an unaccounta- 



GENERAL WASHINGTON 181 

ble kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people, 
which, believe me, prevails but too generally among the 
officers of the Massachusetts part of the army, who are 
nearly of the same kidney with the privates." He had 
seen like demoralization and slackness in the old days at 
"Winchester, on the wild frontier, but he had expected 
to find a better spirit and discipline in the New England 
levies. 

His first disgust, however, soon wore off. He was 
not slow to see how shrewd and sturdy these uncouth, 
intractable ploughboys and farmers could prove them- 
selves upon occasion. " I have a sincere pleasure in 
observing," he wrote to congress, " that there are 
materials for a good army, a great number of able- 
bodied men, active, zealous in the cause, and of unques- 
tionable courage." There was time enough and to 
spare in which to learn his army's quality. " Our lines 
of defence are now completed," he could tell Lund 
Washington on the 20th of August, " as near so at least 
as can be — we now wish them to come out as soon as 
they please ; but they discover no inclination to quit 
their own works of defence; and as it is almost im- 
possible for us to get at them, we do nothing but watch 
each other's motions all day at the distance of about a 
mile." He could even turn away from military affairs 
to advise that " spinning should go forward with all 
possible despatch " on the estate at home, and to say, 
" I much approve of your sowing wheat in clean ground, 
although you should be late in doing it." Once more 
he settled to the old familiar work, this time upon a 
great scale, of carrying a difficult enterprise forward by 
correspondence. Letters to the Continental Congress 
at Philadelphia, letters to the provincial congresses of 



!82 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

the New England colonies, letters to subordinate (some- 
times insubordinate) officers at distant posts, letters to 
intimate friends and influential men everywhere, setting 
forth the needs and situation of the army, advising 
measures of organization, supply, and defence, pointing 
out means that might be used and mistakes that must 
be avoided, commanding, dissuading, guiding, forecast- 
ing, poured steadily forth from those busy headquarters, 
where the commander-in-chief was always to be found, 
intent, deeply employed, calmly imperative, never tir- 
ing, never hesitating, never storming, a leader and mas- 
ter of men and affairs. He was in his prime, and all 
the forty-three years of his strenuous life he had been 
at school to learn how such a task as this was to be 
performed. He had found the army not only without 
proper discipline and equipment, but actually without 
powder; and the winter had come and was passing 
away before even that primary and perilous need could 
be supplied. The men of that extemporized army had 
been enlisted but for a few months' service. When 
their brief terms of enlistment ran out they inconti- 
nently took themselves off; and Washington's most 
earnest appeals to the continental and provincial con- 
gresses to provide for longer enlistments and an adequate 
system of recruitment did not always suffice to prevent 
his force from perilously dwindling away under his very 
eyes. It was a merciful providence that disposed the 
British to lie quiet in Boston. 

Such authority as he had, Washington used to the ut- 
most, and with a diligence and foresight which showed 
all his old policy of Thorough. Under his orders a few 
fast vessels were fitted out and armed as privateers at 
the nearest safe ports. Marblehead volunteers in the 



GENERAL WASHINGTON 183 

army were put aboard them for crews, and the enemy's 
supplies were captured upon the seas and brought over- 
land — the much-needed powder and all — into the Amer- 
ican camp, while men-of-war which might have swept 
the coast lay just at hand in the harbor. No opportu- 
nity was missed either to disturb the British or to get 
Avhat the army needed ; and the ministers at home, as 
well as the commanders in Boston, grew uneasy and 
apprehensive in the presence of so active and watchful 
an opponent. He was playing the game boldly, even a 
bit desperately at times. More than once, as the slow 
months of siege dragged by, he would have hazarded a 
surprise and sought to take the city by storm, had not 
the counsel of his officers persistently restrained him. 

Only in the north was there such fighting as he wished 
to see. Montgomery had pushed through the forests and 
taken Montreal (November 12th, 1775). At the same 
time Washington had sent a force of some twelve hun- 
dred men, under Benedict Arnold, to see what could be 
done against the little garrison at Quebec. The journey 
had cost Arnold four hundred men ; but with what he 
had left he had climbed straight to the Heights of Abra- 
ham and summoned the British at their gates. When 
they would neither surrender nor fight, he had sat 
down to wait for Montgomery ; and when he came, with 
barely ijve hundred men, had stormed the stout de- 
fences, in a driving snow-storm, in the black darkness 
that came just before the morning on the last day of 
the j^ear. Had Montgomery not been killed in the as- 
sault, the surprise would have succeeded ; and Arnold 
had no cause to be ashamed of the gallant affair. Fail- 
ure though it was, it heartened the troops before Boston 
to think what might be done under such officers. 



184 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

The monotony of the long, anxious season was broken 
at Cambridge by a touch now and again of such pleas- 
ures as spoke of home and gracious peace. In midwin- 
ter Mrs. Washington had driven into camp, come all the 
way from Virginia, with proper escort, in her coach and 
four, her horses bestridden by black postilions in their 
livery of scarlet and white ; and she had seemed to bring 
with her to the homely place not only the ceremoni- 
ous habit, but the genial and hospitable air of Virginia 
as well. Many a quiet entertainment at headquarters 
coaxed a little ease of mind out of the midst of even 
that grim and trying winter s work while she was there. 

With the first month of spring Washington deter- 
mined to cut inaction short and make a decisive stroke. 
He had been long enough with the army now to pre- 
sume upon its confidence and obedience, though he fol- 
lowed his own counsels. Siege cannon had been dragged 
through the unwilling forests all the way from Ticon- 
deroga; the supplies and the time had come ; and on the 
morning of the 5th of March, 1776, the British stared 
to see ramparts and cannon on Dorchester Heights. 
" It was like the work of the genii of Aladdin's wonder- 
ful lamp," declared one of their astonished officers. 
Why they had themselves neglected to occupy the hills 
of Dorchester, and had waited so patiently till Wash- 
ington should have time and such guns as he needed, 
was a question much pressed at home in England ; and 
their stupidity was rewarded now. They had suffered 
themselves to be amused all night by a furious cannon- 
ading out of Eoxbury, Somerville, and East Cambridge, 
while two thousand men, a battery of heavy ordnance, 
and hundreds of wagons and ox-carts with timber, bales 
of hay, spades, crowbars, hatchets, hammers, and nails, 



GENERAL WASHINGTON 185 

had been gotten safely to the Dorchester hills. When 
they saw what had happened they thought of the assault 
Mpon Bunkers Hill, and hesitated what to do. A vio- 
lent storm blew up while they waited, rendering an at- 
tack across the water impracticable, and when the calmer 
morning of the 6th dawned it was too late ; the Ameri- 
can position was too strong. ^Neither the town nor the 
harbor could safely be held under fire from Dorchester 
Heights. There was nothing for it but to evacuate the 
place, and no one gainsaid their departure. By the 17th 
they were all embarked, eight thousand troops and nine 
hundred loyalist citizens of Boston, and had set sail 
towards the north for Halifax. They were obliged to 
leave behind them more than two hundred cannon and 
a great quantity of military stores of every kind — pow- 
der, muskets, gun-carriages, small-arms — whatever an 
army might need. When Washington established him- 
self in General Howe's headquarters, in Mrs. Edwards's 
comfortable lodging-house at the head of State Street, 
he could congratulate himself not only on a surprising 
victory brilliantly won, but on the possession, besides, 
of more powder and better stores and equipments than 
he could have dreamed of in his camp at Cambridge. 
He caught up his landlady's little granddaughter one 
day, set her on his knee, as he liked to do, and asked 
her, smiling, which she liked the better, the redcoats or 
the provincials. 

" The redcoats," said the child. 

" Ah, my dear," said the young general, a blithe light 
in his blue eyes, " they look better, but they don't fight. 
The ragged fellows are the bovs for fighting." 

But he did not linger at Boston. He knew that its 
capture did not end, but only deepened, the struggle. 



186 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

Reinforcements would be poured out of England with 
the spring, and the next point of attack would unques- 
tionably be New York, the key to the Hudson. Here 
again was a city flanked about on either hand by water, 
and commanded by heights — the heights of Brooklyn. 
A garrison must be left in Boston, and New York must 
be held for the most part by a new levy, as raw, as ill 
organized and equipped, as factious, as uncertain in ca- 
pacity and purpose, as that which had awaited his dis- 
cipline and guidance before Boston. It was an army 
always a-making and to be made. The sea was open, 
moreover. The British could enter the great harbor 
when they pleased. The insurgents had no naval force 
whatever with which to withstand them on the water. 
There were a score of points to be defended which w T ere 
yet without defence on the long island where the town 
lay, and round about the spreading arms of the sea that 
enclosed it ; and there were but eighteen thousand mili- 
tia-men mustered for the formidable task, in the midst 
of an active loyalist population. The thing must be 
attempted, nevertheless. The command of the Hudson 
would very likely turn out to be the command of the 
continent, and the struggle was now to be to the death. 
It was too late to draw back. The royal authority 
had, in fact, been everywhere openly thrown off, even 
in the middle colonies, where allegiance and opinion 
hung still at so doubtful a balance. For Washington 
the whole situation must have seemed to be summed up 
in what had taken place in his own colony at home. 
Dunmore, when he Med to the men-of-war in the bay, 
had called upon all who were loyal to follow him ; had 
even offered freedom to all slaves and servants who 
would enlist in the force he should collect for the pur- 



GENERAL WASHINGTON 187 

pose of "reducing the colony to a proper sense of its 
duty." Unable to do more, he had ravaged the coasts 
on either hand upon the Bay, and had put men ashore 
within the rivers to raid and burn, making Norfolk, with 
its loyalist merchants, his headquarters and rendezvous. 
Driven thence by the provincial militia, he had utterly 
destroyed the town by fire, and was now refuged upon 
Gwynn's Island, striking when he could, as before, at 
the unprotected hamlets and plantations that looked 
every w T here out upon the water. Virginia's only execu- 
tive, these nine months and more, had been her Com- 
mittee of Safety, of which Edmund Pendleton was pres- 
ident. 

Washington had hardly begun his work of organiza- 
tion and defence at New York before North Carolina 
(April 12th, 1776) authorized her delegates in the con- 
gress at Philadelphia to join in a declaration of indepen- 
dence; and the next month (May 15th) the congress ad- 
vised the colonies to give over all show and pretence of 
waiting for or desiring peace or accommodation: to form 
complete and independent governments of their own, 
and so put an end to " the exercise of every kind of au- 
thority under the crown." The next step was a joint 
Declaration of Independence, upon a motion made in 
congress by Richard Henry Lee, in eager obedience to 
the express bidding of a convention met in the hall of 
the Burgesses at Williamsburg to frame a constitution 
for Virginia. His motion was adopted by the votes of 
every colony except New York. It was a bitter thing 
to many a loyal man in the colonies to see such things 
done, and peace rendered impossible. Not even those 
who counted themselves among the warmest friends of 
the colonial cause were agreed that it was wise thus to 



188 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

throw off one government before another was put in its 
place — while there was as yet no better guidance in that 
distracted time than might be had from a body of gen- 
tlemen in Philadelphia who possessed no power but to 
advise. But the radicals were in the saddle. Washing- 
ton himself came down from New York to urge that the 
step be taken. He deemed such radicalism wise ; for he 
wished to see compromise abandoned, and all minds set 
as sternly as his own in the resolve to fight the fight 
out to the bitter end. " I have never entertained an 
idea of an accommodation," he said, " since I heard of 
the measures which were adopted in consequence of the 
Bunker's Hill fight"; and his will hardened to the con- 
test after the fashion that had always been characteris- 
tic of him when once the heat of action was upon him. 
He grew stern, and spoke sometimes with a touch of 
harshness, in the presence of his difficulties at New 
York; because he knew that they were made for him in 
no small part by Americans who were in the British in- 
terest, and whom he scorned even while scrupulous to 
be just in what he did to thwart and master them. " It 
requires more serenity of temper, a deeper understand- 
ing, and more courage than fell to the lot of Marlbor- 
ough to ride in this whirlwind," said John Adams; and 
the young commander-in-chief had them all. But his 
quiet was often that of a metal at white heat, and he 
kindled a great fire with what he touched. 

No strength of will, however, could suffice to hold 
New York and its open harbor against a powerful ene- 
my with such troops as Washington could drill and 
make between April and July. On the 28th of June 
British transports began to gather in the lower bay. 
Within a few days they had brought thirty thousand 



GENERAL WASHINGTON 189 

men, armed and equipped as no other army had ever 
been in America. It was impossible to prevent their 
landing, and they were allowed to take possession of 
Staten Island unopposed. Men-of-war passed untouched 
through the Narrows, and made their way at will up the 
broad Hudson, unhurt by the batteries upon either shore. 
General Howe remembered Dorchester and Charlestown 
Heights, and directed his first movement against Wash- 
ington's intrenched position on the hills of Brooklyn, 
where quite half the American army lay. For a little 
space he waited, till his brother, Admiral Lord Howe, 
should come to act with him in negotiation and com- 
mand. Lord Howe was authorized to offer pardon for 
submission, and very honorably used a month and more 
of good fighting time in learning that the colonists had 
no desire to be pardoned. " No doubt we all need par- 
don from Heaven for our manifold sins and transgres- 
sions," was Governor Trumbull's Connecticut version of 
the general feeling, " but the American who needs the 
pardon of his Britannic Majesty is yet to be found." 
On the 22d of August, accordingly, General Howe put 
twenty thousand men ashore at Gravesend Bay. On 
the 27th, his arrangements for an overwhelming attack 
succeeding at every point, he drove the five thousand 
Americans thrown out to oppose him back into their 
works upon the heights, with a loss of four hundred 
killed and wounded and a thousand taken. Still mind- 
ful of Bunker's Hill, he would not storm the intrench- 
ments, to which Washington himself had brought rein- 
forcements which swelled his strength upon the heights 
to ten thousand. He determined, instead, to draw lines 
of siege about them, and at his leisure take army, posi- 
tion, stores, and all. Washington, seeing at once what 



190 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

Howe intended, and how possible it was, decided to 
withdraw immediately, before a fleet should be in the 
river and his retreat cut off. It was a masterly piece of 
work. The British commander was as much astounded 
to see Brooklyn Heights empty on the morning of Au- 
gust 30th as he had been to see Dorchester Heights oc- 
cupied that memorable morning six months before. 
Washington had taken ten thousand men across that 
broad river, with all their stores and arms, in a single 
night, while a small guard kept up a sharp fire from the 
breastworks, and no sound of the retreat reached the 
dull ears of the British sentries. 

But the sharp fighting and bitter defeat of the 27th had 
sadly, even shamefully, demoralized Washington's raw 
troops, and he knew he must withdraw from New York. 
All through September and a part of October he held 
what he could of the island, fighting for it almost mile 
by mile as he withdrew — now cut to the quick and 
aflame with almost uncontrollable anger to see what 
cowards his men could be ; again heartened to see them 
stand and hold their ground like men, even in the open. 
The most that he could do was to check and thwart the 
powerful army pressing steadily upon his front and the 
free fleet threatening his flanks. He repulsed the ene- 
my at Harlem Heights (September 16th) ; he kept his 
ground before them at White Plains, despite the loss of 
an outpost at Chatterton Hill (October 2Sth); he might 
possibly have foiled and harassed them the winter 
through had not General Greene suffered a garrison of 
three thousand of the best-trained men in the army to 
be penned up and taken, with a great store of artillery 
and small-arms besides, in Fort Washington, on the isl- 
and (November 16th). After such a blow there was 



GENERAL WASHINGTON 191 

nothing for it but to abandon the Hudson and retreat 
through New Jersey. His generals growing insubordi- 
nate, Washington could not even collect his divisions and 
unite his forces in retreat. His men deserted by the 
score ; whole companies took their way homeward as 
their terms of enlistment expired with the closing of the 
year : barely three thousand men remained with him by 
the time he had reached Princeton. Congress, in its 
fright, removed to Baltimore : hundreds of persons hur- 
ried to take the oath of allegiance upon Howe's offer of 
pardon; and the British commanders deemed the rebel- 
lion at an end. 

Thev did not understand the man thev were fiofhtincr. 
When he had put the broad Delaware between his 
dwindling regiments and the British at his heels, he 
stopped, undaunted, to collect force and give his oppo- 
nents a taste of his quality. Such an exigency only stif- 
fened his temper, and added a touch of daring to his 
spirit. Charles Lee. his second in command, hoping to 
make some stroke for himself upon the Hudson, had 
withheld full half the army in a safe post upon the river, 
in direct disobedience to orders, while the British drove 
Washington southward through New Jersey ; but Lee 
was now happily in the hands of the enemy, taken at an 
unguarded tavern where he lodged, and most of the 
troops he had withheld found their way at last to Wash- 
ington beyond the Delaware. Desperate efforts at re- 
cruiting were made. Washington strained his authority 
to the utmost to keep and equip his force, and excused 
himself to congress very nobly. " A character to lose,' 3 
he said. " an estate to forfeit, the inestimable blessing of 
liberty at stake, and a life devoted must be my excus 
What he planned and did won him a character with his 



192 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

foes. Before the year was out he had collected six 
thousand men, and was ready to strike a blow at the 
weak, extended line — Hessian mercenaries for the most 
part — which Howe had left to hold the Delaware. 

On Christmas Day he made his advance, and ordered 
a crossing to be made in three divisions, under cover of 
the night. Only his own division, twenty-five hundred 
strong, effected the passage. 'Twas ten hours' perilous 
work to cross the storm-swept river in the pitchy dark- 
ness, amidst the hazards of floating ice, but not a man 
or a gun was lost. There was a nine miles' march 
through driving snow and sleet after the landing before 
Trenton could be reached, the point of attack, and two 
men were frozen to death as they went. General Sulli- 
van sent word that the guns were wet : " Tell him to 
use the bayonet," said Washington, "for the town must 
be taken." And it was taken — in the early morning, at 
the point of the bayonet, with a loss of but two or three 
men. The surprise was complete. Colonel Rahl, the 
commander of the place, was mortally wounded at the 
first onset, and nine hundred Hessians surrendered at 
discretion. 

When he had gotten his prisoners safe on the south 
side of the river, Washington once more advanced to oc- 
cupy the town. It was a perilous place to be, no doubt, 
with the great unbriclged stream behind him ; but the 
enemy's line was everywhere broken, now that its cen- 
tre had been taken ; had been withdrawn from the 
river in haste, abandoning its cannon even and its 
baggage at Burlington ; and Washington calmly dared 
to play the game he had planned. It was not Howe 
who came to meet him, but the gallant Cornwallis, no 
mean adversary, bringing eight thousand men. Wash- 



GENERAL WASHINGTON 193 

ington let him come all the way to the Delaware with- 
out himself stirring, except to put a small tributary 
stream between his men. and the advancing columns; 
and the confident Englishman went to bed that night 
exclaiming, " At last we have run down the old fox, 
and we'll bag him in the morning." Then, while a 
small force kept the camp-fires burning and worked 
audibly at the ramparts the cold night through, the 
fox was up and away. He put the whole of his force 
upon the road to Princeton and New Brunswick, where 
he knew Cornwallis's stores must be. As the morning's 
light broadened into day (January 3d, 1777) he met the 
British detachment at Princeton in the way, and drove 
it back in decisive rout, a keen ardor coming into his 
blood as he saw the sharp work done. "An old-fash- 
ioned Virginia fox-hunt, gentlemen," he exclaimed, 
shouting the view -halloo. Had his troops been fresh 
and properly shod to outstrip Cornwallis at their heels, 
he would have pressed on to New Brunswick and taken 
the stores there; but he had done all that could be done 
with despatch, and withdrew straight to the heights 
of Morristown. Cornwallis could only hasten back to 
New York. By the end of the month the Americans 
were everywhere afoot ; the British held no posts in 
New Jersey but Paulus Hook, Amboy, and New Bruns- 
wick ; and Washington had issued a proclamation com- 
manding all who had accepted General Howe's offer of 
pardon either to withdraw within the British lines or 
to take oath of allegiance to the United States. Men 
loved to tell afterwards how Frederick the Great had 
said that it was the most brilliant campaign of the cen- 
tury. 

Congress took steps before the winter was over to 

13 



194 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

secure long enlistments, and substitute a veritable army 
for the three months' levies with which Washington 
had hitherto been struggling to make shift. After the 
affair at Trenton, Washington had been obliged to 
pledge his own private fortune for their pay to induce 
the men whose terms of enlistment were to expire on 
New Year's Day — more than half his force — to stay 
with him but a few weeks more, till his plan should be 
executed. Now he was authorized to raise regiments 
enlisted till the war should end, and to exercise almost 
dictatorial powers in everything that might affect the 
discipline, provisioning, and success of his army. There 
was need, for the year witnessed fighting of tremendous 
consequence. The British struck for nothing less than 
complete possession of the whole State of New York, 
throughout the valleys of the Hudson and the Mohawk. 
General Howe, who had above twenty thousand men 
in New York city, was to move up the Hudson ; Gen-' 
eral Burgoyne, with eight thousand men, from Canada 
down Lake Champlain ; Colonel St. Leger, with a small 
but sufficient force, down into the valley of the Mo- 
hawk, striking from Oswego, on Ontario; and the col- 
onies were to be cut in twain, New England hopeless- 
ly separated from her confederates, by the converging 
sweep of three armies, aggregating more than thirty- 
three thousand men. But only the coast country, it 
turned out, w T as tenable ground for British troops. Sir 
Guy Carleton had attempted Champlain out of Canada 
the year before, and had gone back to Quebec without 
touching- Ticondero^a, so disconcerted had he been b.v 
the price he had had to pay for his passage up the lake 
to a small force and an extemporized fleet under Ben- 
edict Arnold. This time Burgoyne, with his splendid 



GENERAL WASHINGTON 195 

army, made short work of Ticonderoga (July, 1777), 
and drove General Schuyler and his army back to their 
posts beyond the Hudson ; but the farther he got from 
his base upon the lake into the vast forests of that wide 
frontier, the more certainly did he approach disaster. 
No succor came. St. Leger was baffled, and sent in 
panic back the way he had come. Howe did not ascend 
the river. The country swarmed with gathering mili- 
tia. They would not volunteer for distant campaigns ; 
but this invading host, marching by their very homes 
into the deep forest, roused and tempted them as they 
had been roused at Concord, and they gathered at its 
rear and upon its flanks as they had run together to in- 
vest Boston. A thousand men Burgoyne felt obliged 
to leave in garrison at Ticonderoga; a thousand more, 
sent to Bennington to seize the stores there, were over- 
whelmed and taken (August 16th). Quite twenty thou- 
sand provincials presently beset him, and he had but six 
thousand left wherewith to save himself. He crossed 
the river, for he still expected Howe; and there was 
stubborn fighting about Saratoga (September 19th, Oc- 
tober 7th), in which Arnold once more made his name 
in battle. But the odds were too great; Burgoyne's sup- 
plies were cut off, his troops beaten; there was nothing 
for it but capitulation (October 17th). He had been 
trapped and taken by a rising of the country. 

Howe had not succored him, partly because he lacked 
judgment and capacity, partly because Washington had 
thwarted him at every turn. From his position at Mor- 
ristown, Washington could send reinforcements to the 
north or recall them at will, without serious delay ; and 
Howe, in his hesitation, gave him abundant time to do 
what he would. It was Sir William's purpose to occupy 



196 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

the early summer, ere Burgoyne should need him, in an 
attack on Philadelphia. On the 12th of June, accord- 
ingly, he threw a force of eighteen thousand men into 
New Jersey. But Washington foiled him at each at- 
tempt to advance by hanging always upon his flank in 
such a position that he could neither be safely ignored 
nor forced to fight; and the prudent Howe, abandoning 
the march, withdrew once more to New York. But he 
did not abandon his project against Philadelphia. He 
deemed it the " capital " of the insurgent confederac}', 
and wished to discredit congress and win men of doubt- 
ful allegiance to his standard by its capture; and he 
reckoned upon some advantage in drawing Washington 
after him to the southward, away from Burgoyne's field 
of operations in the north. Though July had come, 
therefore, and Burgoyne must need him presently, he 
put his eighteen thousand men aboard the fleet and 
carried them by sea to the Chesapeake. Washington 
was sorely puzzled. He had taken it for granted 
that Howe would go north, and he had gone south! 
" Howe's in a manner abandoning Burgoyne is so un- 
accountable," he said, " that I cannot help casting my 
eyes continually behind me;" and he followed very 
cautiously, ready upon the moment to turn back, lest 
the movement should prove a feint. But there was no 
mistake. Howe entered the Delaware, and, being fright- 
ened thence by reports of obstructions in the river, went 
all the long four hundred miles about the capes of 
Chesapeake, and put his army ashore at Elkton for its 
advance upon Philadelphia. It was then the 25th of 
August. Washington met him (September 11th) behind 
the fords of the Brandy wine, and, unable to check 
Cornwallis on his flank, was defeated. But for him 



GENERAL WASHINGTON 197 

defeat was never rout : his army was still intact and 
steady ; and he held nis foe yet another fortnight on 
the road ere the "capital" could be entered (September 
27th). Burgoyne was by that time deep within the net 
spread for him at Saratoga. On the morning of the 4th 
of October, in a thick mist, Washington threw himself 
upon Howe's main force encamped across the village 
street of Germantown, and would have overwhelmed it 
in the surprising onset had not two of his own columns 
gone astray in the fog, attacked each other, and so lost 
the moment's opportunity. General Howe knew \ j ery 
soon how barren a success he had had. The end of 
November came before he had made himself master of 
the forts upon the Delaware below the " capital " and 
removed the obstructions from the river to give access 
to his fleet ; the British power was broken and made an 
end of in the north ; and Washington was still at hand 
as menacing and dangerous as ever. Dr. Franklin was 
told in Paris that General Howe had taken Philadel- 
phia. " Philadelphia has taken Howe," he laughed. 

Philadelphia kept Howe safely through the winter, 
and his officers made themselves easy amidst a round of 
gayeties in the complacent town, while Washington 
went to Valley Forge to face the hardships and the in- 
trigues of a bitter season. A deep demoralization fell 
that winter, like a blight, upon all the business of the 
struggling confederacy. The congress, in its exile at 
York, had lost its tone and its command in affairs. It 
would have lost it as completely in Philadelphia, no 
doubt, for it was no longer the body it had been. Its 
best members were withdrawn to serve their respective 
states in the critical business, now everywhere in hand, 
of reorganizing their governments ; and it itself was no 



19 8 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

government at all, but simply a committee of advice, 
which the states heeded or ignored as they pleased. 
Oftentimes but ten or twelve members could be got to- 
gether to transact its business. It suffered itself to fall 
into the hands of intriguers and sectional politicians. 
It gave commissions in the army not according to merit, 
but upon a plan carefully devised to advance no more 
officers from one section than from another — even men 
like John Adams approving. Adams denounced claims 
of seniority and service as involving " one of the most 
putrid corruptions of absolute monarchy," and suggest- 
ed that the officers who did not relish the idea of seeing 
the several states given " a share of the general officers," 
proportioned to the number of troops they had sent to 
the army, had better take themselves off, and see how 
little they would be missed. Worst of all, an ugly plot 
was hatched to displace Washington ; and the various 
distempers of different men for a brief season gave it a 
chance to succeed. Some were impatient of Washing- 
ton's " Fabian policy," as they called it, and would have 
had him annihilate, instead of merely checking, these 
invading: hosts. " Mv toast," cried John Adams, " is a 
short and violent war." Others envied Washington his 
power and his growing fame, resented their own subor- 
dination and his supremacy, and intrigued to put Gen- 
eral Gates in his place. Had not Gates won at Sara- 
toga, and Washington lost at the Brandywine and at 
Germantown? Schuyler had prepared the victory in 
the north ; Arnold and Morgan had done the fighting 
that secured it ; but Gates had obtained the command 
when all was ready, and was willing to receive the re- 
ward. With a political committee-congress in charge of 
affairs, nothing was impossible. 



GENERAL WASHINGTON 199 

Washington and his army were starving the while 
at Valley Forge, in desperate straits to get anything 
to eat or anything to cover them in that bitter season — 
not because there were no supplies, but because congress 
had disorganized the commissary department, and the 
supplies seldom reached the camp. The country had 
not been too heavily stricken by the war. Abundant 
crops were everywhere sown and peacefully reaped, and 
there were men enough to do the work of seed-time and 
harvest. It was only the army that was suffering for 
lack of food and lack of men. The naked fact was that 
the confederacy was falling apart for lack of a govern- 
ment. Local selfishness had overmastered national feel- 
ing, and only a few men like Washington held the 
breaking 1 structure together. Washington's steadfast- 
ness was never shaken ; and Mrs. Washington, stanch 
lady that she was, joined him even at Valley Forge. 
The intrigue against him he watched in stern silence 
till it was ripe and evident, then he crushed it with 
sudden exposure, and turned away in contempt, hardly 
so much as mentioning it in his letters to his friends. 
" Their own artless zeal to advance their views has 
destroyed them," he said. His soldiers he succored and 
supplied as he could, himself sharing their privations, 
and earning their love as he served them. " Naked and 
starving as they are," he wrote, " we cannot sufficiently 
admire the incomparable patience and fidelity of the 
soldiers." And even out of that grievous winter some 
profit was wrung. Handsome sums of French money 
had begun of late to come slowly into the confederate 
treasury — for France, for the nonce, was quick with 
sympathy for America, and glad to lend secret aid 
against an old foe. Presently, she promised, she would 



200 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

recognize the independence of the United States, and 
herself grapple once more with England. Meanwhile 
French, German, and Polish officers hurried over sea 
to serve as volunteers with the raw armies of the con- 
federacy — adventurers, some of them; others sober 
veterans, gentlemen of fortune, men of generous and 
noble quality — among the rest the boyish Lafayette 
and the distinguished Steuben. Baron von Steuben 
had won himself a place on the great Frederick's staff 
in the Seven Years' War, and was of that studious race 
of soldiers the world was presently to learn to fear. He 
joined Washington at Valley Forge, and turned the 
desolate camp into a training-school of arms, teaching, 
what these troops had never known before, promptness 
and precision in the manual of arms, in massed and 
ordered movement, in the use of the bayonet, the drill 
and mastery of the charge and of the open field. Nei- 
ther Washington nor any of his officers had known how 
to give this training. The commander-in-chief had not 
even had a properly organized staff till this schooled 
and thorough German supplied it, and he was valued 
in the camp as he deserved. " You say to your soldier, 
' Do this,' and he doeth it," he wrote to an old comrade 
in Prussia ; " I am obliged to say to mine, ' This is the 
reason why you ought to do that,' and then he does 
it." But he learned to like and to admire his new com- 
rades soon enough when he found what spirit and 
capacity there was in them for the field of action. 

The army came out of its dismal winter quarters 
stronger than it had ever been before, alike in spirit 
and in discipline; more devoted to its commander than 
ever, and more fit to serve him. At last the change to 
a system of long enlistments had transformed it from 



h 






k 




' ^ 



WASHINGTON AND STEUBEN AT VALLEY 



FORGE 



GENERAL WASHINGTON 201 

a levy of militia into an army steadied by service, un- 
afraid of the field. The year opened, besides, with a 
new hope and a new confidence. They were no longer 
a body of insurgents even to the eye of Europe. News 
came to the camp late in the night of the 4th of May 
(1778) that France had entered into open alliance with 
the United States, and would send fleets and an army 
to aid in securing their independence. Such an alliance 
changed the whole face of affairs. England would no 
longer have the undisputed freedom of the seas, and 
the conquest of her colonies in America might turn out 
the least part of her task in the presence of European 
enemies. She now knew the full significance of Sara- 
toga and Germantown. Washington's splendid audac- 
ity and extraordinary command of his resources in 
throwing himself upon his victorious antagonist at Ger- 
mantown as the closing move of a long retreat had 
touched the imagination and won the confidence of for- 
eign soldiers and statesmen hardly less than the taking 
of Burgoyne at Saratoga. Parliament at last (Febru- 
ary, 1778) came to its senses : resolved to renounce the 
right to tax the colonies, except for the regulation of 
trade, and sent commissioners to America to offer such 
terms for submission. But it was too late ; neither con- 
gress nor the states would now hear of anything but 
independence. 

With a French fleet about to take the sea, it was 
necessary that the British commanders in America 
should concentrate their forces. Philadelphia, they had 
at last found out, was a burden, not a prize. It had 
no strategic advantage of position ; was hard to defend, 
and harder to provision ; was too far from the sea, and 
not far enough from Washington's open lines of opera- 



202 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

tion. Before the summer's campaign began, Sir Wil- 
liam Howe resigned his command and bade the town 
good-bye, amidst elaborate festivities (May 18th, 177 v 
General Clinton, who succeeded him, received orders 
from England to undo Howe's work at once, abandon 
Philadelphia, and concentrate his forces at New York. 
'Twas easier said than done. There were not transports 
enough to move his fifteen thousand men by sea ; only 
the three thousand loyalists who had put themselves 
under his protection could be sent in the ships, with a 
portion of his stores ; he must cross the hostile country ; 
and his march was scarcely begun (June 18th) before 
Washington was at his heels, with a force but little 
inferior to his own either in numbers or in discipline. 
He might never have reached New York at all had 
not Charles Lee been once more second in command in 
the American army. He had come out of captivity, 
exchanged, and now proved himself the insubordinate 
poltroon he was. He had never had any real heart in 
the cause. He owned estates in Virginia, but he was 
not of the great Virginian family of the Northern Neck. 
He was only a soldier of fortune, strayed out of the 
British service on half-pay to seek some profit in the 
colonies, and cared for no interest but his own. While 
a prisoner he had secretly directed Howe's movement 
against Philadelphia, and now he was to consummate 
his cowardly treachery. Washington outstripped his 
opponent in the movement upon New York, and deter- 
mined to fall upon him at Monmonth Court House, 
where, on the night of the 27th of June, Clinton's divis- 
ions lay separate, offering a chance to cut them asun- 
der. On the morning of the 28th, Lee was ordered 
forward with six thousand men to enfold Clinton's left 



GENERAL WASHINGTON 203 

wing — eight thousand men, the flower of the British 
force — by gaining its flank, while Washington held his 
main body ready to strike in his aid at the right mo- 
ment. The movement was perfectly successful, and 
the fighting had begun, when, to the amazement and 
chagrin alike of officers and men, Lee began to with- 
draw. Lafayette sent a messenger hot-foot for Wash- 
ington, who rode up to find his men, not attacking, but 
pursued. "What is the meaning of all this?" he thun- 
dered, his wrath terrible to see. When Lee would have 
made some excuse, he hotly cursed him, in his fury, for 
a coward, himself rallied the willing troops, and led 
them forward again to a victory : won back the field 
Lee had abandoned, and drove the enemy to the cover 
of a morass. In the night that followed, Clinton hastily 
withdrew, leaving even his wounded behind him, and 
Washington's chance to crush him was gone. 

" Clinton gained no advantage except to reach New 
York with the wreck of his army," commented the ob- 
servant Frederick over sea ; " America is probably lost 
for England." But a great opportunity had been treach- 
erously thrown away, and the war dragged henceforth 
with every painful trial of hope deferred. A scant three 
weeks after Clinton had reached New York, the Count 
d'Estaing was off Sandy Hook, with a French fleet of 
twelve ships of the line and six frigates, bringing four 
thousand troops. The British fleet within the harbor 
was barely half as strong ; but the pilots told the cau- 
tious Frenchman that his larger ships could not cross 
the bar, and he turned away from New York to strike 
at Newport, the only other point now held by the Brit- 
ish in all the country. That place had hardly been in- 
vested, however, when Lord Howe appeared with a 



204 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

stronger fleet than the French. D'Estaing was obliged 
to draw off to meet him ; a great storm sent both fleets 
into port to refit instead of to fight; and the disgusted 
militia-men and continentals, who had come to take the 
town with the French, withdrew in high choler to see 
the fleet, without which they could do nothing, taken 
off to Boston. When the autumn came Clinton felt 
free to send thirty- five hundred men to the Southern 
coast, and Savannah was taken (December 29th, 1778). 
Only in the far West, at the depths of the great wilder- 
ness beyond the mountains, was anything done that 
promised decisive advantage. George Rogers Clark, 
that daring Saxon frontiersman, who moved so like a 
king through the far forests, swept the whole country 
of the Illinois free from British soldiers and British au- 
thority that winter of 1778-9, annexing it to the states 
that meant to be independent ; and a steady stream of 
immigration began to pour into the opened country, as 
if to prepare a still deeper task of conquest for the Brit- 
ish at far New York. 

But few noted in the East what gallant men were do- 
ing in the valley of the Mississippi. They saw only 
that the British, foiled in New England and the middle 
colonies, had changed their plans, and were now minded 
to try what could be done in the South. There at last 
their campaigns seemed about to yield them something. 
Savannah taken, they had little trouble in overrunning 
Georgia, and every effort to dislodge them failed ; for 
Washington could not withdraw his army from before 
Clinton at New York. Spain joined France in offensive 
alliance in April, 1779; in August a combined French 
and Spanish fleet attempted an invasion of England ; all 
Europe seemed about to turn upon the stout little king- 



GENERAL WASHINGTON 205 

dom. in its unanimous fear and hatred of her arrogant 
supremacy upon the seas. Everywhere there was war 
upon the ocean highways — even America sending forth 
men of desperate valor, like John Paul Jones, to ravage 
and challenge Britain upon her very coasts. But Eng- 
land's spirit only rose with the danger, and Washington 
waited all the weary year through for his French allies. 
In 1780 it looked for a little as if the British were in- 
deed turned victors. In the spring Clinton withdrew 
the force that had held Newport to New York, and, 
leaving General Knyphausen there with a powerful 
force to keep Washington and the city, carried eight 
thousand men southward to take Charleston. There 
were forces already in the South sufficient to swell his 
army to ten thousand ere he invested the fated town ; 
and on the 12th of May (1780) it fell into his hands, 
with General Lincoln and three thousand prisoners. 
Washington had sent such succor as he could, but the 
British force was overwhelming, and South Carolina 
was lost. South Carolina teemed with loyalists. The 
whole country was swept and harried by partisan bands. 
The men who should have swelled General Lincoln's 
force knew not wnen their homes might be plundered 
and destroyed, if they were to leave them. The planters 
of the low country dared not stir for fear of an insur- 
rection of their slaved In June, Clinton could take half 
his force back to New York, deeming the work done. 
General Gates completed the disastrous record. On the 
13th of June he was given chief command in the South, 
and was told that the country expected another u Bur- 
goynade." His force was above three thousand, and he 
struck his blow, as he should, at Camden, where Corn- 
wallis had but two thousand men, albeit trained and 



206 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

veteran troops; but the end was total, shameful rout 
(August 16th, 1780), and men knew at last the incapacity 
of their " hero of Saratoga." " We look on America as 
at our feet," said Horace Walpole. 

Certainly things looked desperate enough that dark 
year. The congress was sinking into a more and more 
helpless inefficiency. Definitive articles of confederation 
had been submitted to the states nearly three years ago 
(November, 1777), but they had not been adopted yet, 
and the states had almost ceased to heed the requisitions 
of the congress at all. Unable to tax, it paid its bills 
and the wages of its troops in paper, which so rapidly 
fell in value that by the time the hopeless year 1780 was 
out, men in the ranks found a month's pay too little 
with which to buy even a single bushel of wheat. 
Washington was obliged to levy supplies from the coun- 
try round him to feed his army ; and in spite of their 
stanch loyalty to him, his men grew mutinous, in sheer 
disgust with the weak and faithless government they 
were expected to serve. Wholesale desertion began, as 
many as one hundred men a month going over to the 
enemy, to get at least pay and food and clothing. The 
country seemed not so much dismayed as worn out and 
indifferent; weary of waiting and hoping; looking stol- 
idly to see the end come. Washington was helpless. 
Without the co-operation of a naval force, it was impos- 
sible to do more than hold the British in New York. 
France, it was true, was bestirring herself again. On 
the 10th of July a French fleet put in at Newport and 
landed a force of six thousand men, under Count Ro- 
chambeau, a most sensible and capable officer, who was 
directed to join Washington and put himself entirely 
under his command. But a powerful British fleet pres- 



GENERAL WASHINGTON 207 

ently made its appearance in the Sound ; the French ad- 
miral dared not stir; Kochambeau dared not leave him 
without succor; and the reinforcements that were to 
have followed out of France were blockaded in the har- 
bor of Brest. 

Then, while things stood so, treason was added. Bene- 
dict Arnold, the man whom Washington trusted with a 
deep affection, and whom the army loved for his gal- 
lantry, entered into correspondence with the enemy ; 
arranged to give West Point and the posts dependent 
upon it into their hands; and, his treason suddenly de- 
tected, escaped without punishment to the British sloop 
of war that waited in the river for the British agent in 
the plot. Washington was at hand when the discovery 
was made. His aides were breakfasting with Arnold 
when the traitor was handed the note which told him 
he was found out; and Arnold had scarcely excused 
himself and made good his flight when the commander- 
in-chief reached the house. When Washington learned 
what had happened, it smote him so that mighty sobs 
burst from him, as if his great heart would break ; and 
all the night through the guard could hear him pac- 
ing his room endlessly, in a lonely vigil with his bit- 
ter thoughts. He did not in his own grief forget the 
stricken wife upstairs. " Go to Mrs. Arnold," he said to 
one of his officers, " and tell her that, though my duty 
required that no means should be neglected to arrest 
General Arnold, I have great pleasure in acquainting 
her that he is now safe on board a British vessel." 
Arnold had deemed himself wronged and insulted by 
congress — but what officer that Washington trusted 
might not? Who could be confided in if such men 
turned traitors? 



208 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

But a sudden turning of affairs marked the close of 
the year. Cornwallis had penetrated too far into the 
Carolinas ; had advanced into Xorth Carolina, and was 
beset, as Burgovne had been, by a rising of the country. 
He lost twelve hundred men at King's Mountain (Octo- 
ber Tth, 17S0), as Burgovne had lost a thousand at Ben- 
nington; and everywhere, as he moved, he found him- 
self checked by the best officers the long war had bred 
— Xathanael Greene, who had been Washington's right 
hand the war through ; Henry Lee, the daring master 
of cavalry, whom Washington loved ; the veteran Steu- 
ben ; Morgan, who had won Saratoga with Arnold ; 
and partisan leaders a score, whom he had learned to 
dread in that wide forested country. He was outgener- 
alled ; his forces were taken in detail and beaten, and 
he himself was forced at last into Virginia. By mid- 
summer, 1781, all his interior posts were lost, and he 
was cut off from Charleston and Savannah by a country 
he dared not cross again. In Virginia, though at first 
he raided as he pleased, he was checked more and more 
as the season advanced by a growing force under Lafay- 
ette ; and by the first week in August he had taken 
counsel of prudence, and established himself, seven thou- 
sand strong, at Yorktown, near the sea, his base of sup- 
plies. Then it was that Washington struck the blow 
which ended the war. At last Rochambeau was free to 
move ; at last a French fleet was at hand to block the 
free passage of the sea. The Count de Grasse, with 
twenty-eight ships of the line, six frigates, and twenty 
thousand men, was in the West Indies, and in August 
sent word to Washington that he was about to bring 
his whole fleet to the Chesapeake, as Washington had 
urged. Either the Chesapeake or New York, had been 



GENERAL WASHINGTON 



209 



shington's prayer to him. Making as if he were but 
moving about New York from north to south for some 
advantage of position, Washington suddenly took two 
thousand Continentals and four thousand Frenchmen, 
under Eocbambeau, all the long four hundred miles to 
York Eiver in Virginia, to find Cornwallis already en- 
trapped there, as he had planned, between Grasse's fleet 
in the bay and Lafayette intrenched across the peninsu- 
la with eight thousand men, now the French had loaned 
him three thousand. A few weeks' siege and the de- 
cisive work was done, to the admiration of Cornwallis 
himself. The British armv was taken. The generous 
Englishman could not withhold an expression of his ad- 
miration for the extraordinary skill with which Wash- 
ington had struck all the way from Xew York with six 
thousand men as easily as if with six hundred. u But, 
after all," he added. - your Excellency's achievements in 

■ Jersey were such that nothing could surpass 
them." 







THE STRESS OF VICTORY 



CHAPTER VIII 

The victory at Yorktown brought neither peace nor 
ease in affairs. The revolution was indeed accomplished 
— that every man could see who had the candor to 
look facts in the face; but its accomplishment brought 
tasks harder even than the tasks of war. Hostilities 
slackened — were almost wholly done with before an- 
other spring had come. No more troops came over sea. 
The ministry in England were discredited and ousted. 
Every one knew that the proud mother country must 
yield, for all her stout defiance of the world. But a long 
year dragged by, nevertheless, before even preliminary 
articles of accommodation were signed; and still an- 
other before definitive peace came, with independence 
and the full fruits of victory. Meanwhile there was an 
army to be maintained, despite desperate incompetence 
on the part of the congress and a hopeless indifference 
among the people ; and a government to be kept pre- 
sentably afoot, despite lack of money and lack of men. 
The Articles of Confederation proposed at the heart 
of the war-time (November 15th, 1777) had at last been 
adopted (March 1st, 1781), in season to create at least 
a government which could sign treaties and conclude 
wars, but neither soon enough nor wisely enough to 
bring order out of chaos. The states, glad to think the 
war over, would do nothing for the army, nothing for 



214 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

the public credit, nothing even for the maintenance of 
order ; and the Articles of Confederation only gave the 
congress written warranty for offering advice : they did 
not make its shadowy powers real. 

It was beyond measure fortunate that at such a crit- 
ical time as this Washington still kept his command, 
still held affairs under the steady pressure of his will. 
His successes had at last given him a place of authority 
in the thoughts and affections of his countrymen in 
some sort commensurate with his capacity and his vision 
in affairs. He had risen to a very safe footing of power 
among all the people as the war drew towards its close, 
filling their imaginations, and reigning among them as 
securely as among his troops, who for so long had felt 
his will wrought upon them day by day. His very re- 
serve, and the large dignity and pride of his stately 
bearing, made him seem the more like a hero in the 
people's eyes. They could understand a man made in 
this ample and simple kind, give them but time enough 
to see him in his full proportions. It answered to their 
thought of him to find him too proud to dissemble, too 
masterful to brook unreasonable faults, and yet slow to 
grow impatient, though he must wait a whole twelve- 
month to see a plan mature, or coax a half-score states 
to get a purpose made good. And they could not deem 
him cold, though they found him self-possessed, keeping 
his own counsel ; for was not the country full of talk 
how passionately he was like to act at a moment of 
crisis and in the field? They only feared to lose a lead- 
er so reckless of himself when danger was sharpest. 
" Our army love their general very much," one of his 
officers had said, " but they have one thing against him, 
which is the little care he takes of himself in any 



THE STRESS OF VICTORY 215 

action "; for he had seen how Washington pressed at 
Trenton and at Princeton to the points that were most 
exposed, thinking of his troops, not of himself. The 
spirit of fight had run high in him the whole war 
through. Even during those dismal weeks of 1776, 
when affairs looked darkest, and he had but a handful 
of men about him as he all but fled before Howe 
through New Jersey, he had spoken, as if in the very 
pleasantry of daring, of what he would do should things ' 
come to the worst with him. His thought turned to 
those western fastnesses he knew so well, where the 
highlands of his own state lay, and he spoke calmly of 
a desperate venture thither. " Keed," he exclaimed, to 
one of his aides, " my neck does not feel as though it 
was made for a halter. We must retire to Augusta 
County, in Virginia, and if overpowered, must pass the 
Alleghany Mountains." And when the last movement 
of the war came, it was still with the same feeling that 
he drew his lines about Cornwallis. " We may be 
beaten by the English," he said ; " it is the chance of 
war ; but there is the army they will never conquer." 

" The privates are all generals, but not soldiers," the 
gallant Montgomery had cried, in his hot impatience 
with the heady militia-men he was bidden command ; 
but it was not so in the presence of Washington, when 
once these men had taken his measure. They were 
then "rivals in praising him," the Abbe Kobin de- 
clared, " fearing him even when he was silent, and re- 
taining their full confidence in him after defeats and 
disgrace." The singular majesty and poise of this revo- 
lutionary hero struck the French officers as infinitely 
more remarkable than his mastery in the field and his 
ascendency in council. They had looked to find him 



216 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

great in action, but they had not thought to see in him 
a great gentleman, a man after their own kind in grace 
and courtesy and tact, and yet so lifted above the man- 
ner of courts and drawing-rooms by an incommunicable 
quality of grave sincerity which they were at a loss how 
to describe. No one could tell whether it were a gift of 
the mind or of the heart. It was certain only that it 
constituted the atmosphere and apotheosis of the man. 
The Marquis de Chastellux noted, with a sort of rev- 
erent awe for this hero not yet turned of fifty, how 
perfect a union reigned between his physical and moral 
qualities. " One alone," he declared, " will enable you 
to judge of all the rest." " It is not my intention to 
exaggerate," he said; " I wish only to express my im- 
pression of a perfect whole, which cannot be the prod- 
uct of enthusiasm, since the effect of proportion is 
rather to diminish the idea of greatness." 

Strangers who had noted his appearance in the earlier 
years of the war had remarked the spirit and life that 
sat in Washington's eyes : but when the war was over, 
and its strain relaxed, they found those eyes grown 
pensive, " more attentive than sparkling "; steady still, 
and noble in their frankness and good feeling, but 
touched a little with care, dimmed with watching. The 
Prince de Broglie found him "still as fresh and active 
as a young man" in 1782, but thought "he must have 
been much handsomer three years ago," for " the gen- 
tlemen who had remained with him during all that 
time said that he seemed to have grown much older." 
'T would have been no marvel had he broken under the 
burden he had carried, athletic soldier and hardened 
campaigner though he was. " This is the seventh year 
that he has commanded the army and that he has 



THE STRESS OE VICTORY o 17 

obeyed the congress : more need not be said." the Mar- 
quis de Chastellux declared, unconsciously uttering a 
very bitter gibe against the government, when he 
meant only to praise its general. 

Such service told the more heavily upon Washington 
because he had rendered it in silence. Xo man among 
all the Revolutionary leaders, it is true, had been more 
at the desk than he. Letters of command and persua- 
sion, reports that carried every detail of the army's life 
and hopes in their careful phrases, orders of urgency 
and of provident arrangement, writings of any and 
every sort that might keep the hard war afoot, he had 
poured forth incessantly, and as if incapable of fatigue 
or discouragement. Xo one who was under orders, no 
man who could lend the service a hand or take a turn at 
counsel, was likely to escape seeing the commander-in- 
chiefs handwriting often enough to keep him in mind 
of his tireless power to foresee and to direct. Washing- 
ton seemed present in every transaction of the war. 
And yet always and to every one he seemed a silent 
man. What he said and what he wrote never touched 
himself. He spoke seldom of motives, always of what 
was to be done and considered : and even his secre- 
taries, though they handled the multitude of his papers, 
were left oftentimes to wonder and speculate about the 
man himself — so frank and yet so reserved, so straight- 
forward and simple and yet so proud and self-contained, 
revealing powers, but somehow not revealing himself. 
It must have seemed at times to those who followed 
him and pondered what they saw that he had caught 
from Nature her own manner while he took his breed- 
ing as a boy and his preparation as a man amidst the 
forests of a wild frontier; that his character spoke in 



218 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

what he did and without self - consciousness ; that he 
had no moods but those of action. 

Nor did men know him for what he really was until 
the war was over. His own officers then found they 
had something more to' learn of the man they had 
fought under for six years — and those six, all of them, 
years such as lay bare the characters of men. What 
remained to be done during the two trying, anxious 
years 1782 and 1783 seemed as if intended for a supreme 
and final test of the qualities of the man whose genius 
and character had made the Kevolution possible. " At 
the end of a long civil war," said the Marquis de Chas- 
tellux, with a noble pride for his friend, " he had noth- 
ing with which he could reproach himself"; but it was 
these last years which were to crown this perfect praise 
with its full meaning. In the absence of any real gov- 
ernment, Washington proved almost the only prop of 
authority and law. What the crisis was no one knew 
quite so thoroughly or so particularly as he. It con- 
sisted in the ominous fact that the army was the only 
organized and central power in the country, and that 
it had deep reason for discontent and insubordination. 
When once it had served its purpose greatly at York- 
town, and the war seemed ended at a stroke, the coun- 
try turned from it in indifference — left it without money ; 
talked of disbanding it without further ceremony, and 
with no provision made for arrears of pay; seemed 
almost to challenge it to indignation and mutiny. It 
was necessary, for every reason of prudence and good 
statesmanship, to keep the army still upon a war footing. 
There were sure signs of peace, no doubt, but no man 
could foretell what might be the course of politics ere 
England should have compounded her quarrel with 



THE STRESS OF VICTORY 219 

France and Spain, and ended the wars with which the 
Eevolution had become inextricably involved. 'Twere 
folly to leave the English army at New York unchecked. 
Premature confidence that peace had come might bring 
some sudden disaster of arms, should the enemy take 
the field again. The army must be ready to fight, if 
only to make fighting unnecessary. Washington would 
have assumed the offensive again, would have crushed 
Clinton where he lay in New York; and the congress 
was not slack — as slackness was counted there — in sus- 
taining his counsels. But the congress had no power 
to raise money ; had no power to command. The 
states alone could make it possible to tax the country 
to pay the army : their thirteen governments were the 
only civil authority, and they took the needs and the 
discontents of the army very lightly, deemed peace se- 
cure and war expanses unnecessary, and let matters drift 
as they would. 

They came very near drifting to another revolution 
— a revolution such as politicians had left out of their 
reckoning, and only Washington could avert. After 
Yorktown, Washington spent four months in Philadel- 
phia, helping the congress forward with the business of 
the winter; but as March of the new year (1782) drew 
towards its close, he rejoined the army at New burgh, 
to resume his watch upon New York. He had been 
scarcely two months at his post when a letter was 
placed in his hands which revealed, more fully than any 
observations of his own could have revealed it, the pass 
to which affairs had come. The letter was from Colonel 
Lewis Nicola, an old and respected officer, who stood 
nearer than did most of his fellow-officers to the com- 
mander-in-chief in intimacy and affection, and who felt 



220 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

it his privilege to speak plainly. The letter was calm 
in temper, grave and moderate in tone, with something 
of the gravity and method of a disquisition written 
upon abstract questions of government; did not broach 
its meaning like a revolutionary document. But what 
it proposed was nothing less, when read between the 
lines, than that Washington should suffer himself to be 
made king, and that so an end should be put to the 
incompetency and ingratitude of a band of weak and 
futile republics. Washington met the suggestion with 
a rebuke so direct and overwhelming that Colonel Nicola 
must himself have wondered how he had ever dared 
make such a venture. " Be assured, sir," said the indig- 
nant commander, " no occurrence in the course of the 
war has given me more painful sensations than your in- 
formation of there being such ideas existing in the army. 
... I am much at a loss to conceive what part of my 
conduct could have given encouragement to an address 
which to me seems big with the greatest mischiefs that 
can befall my country. If I am not deceived in the 
knowledge of myself, you could not have found a person 
to whom your schemes are more disagreeable. . . . Let 
me conjure you, if you have any regard for your country, 
concern for yourself or posterity, or respect for me, to 
banish these thoughts from your mind, and never com- 
municate, as from yourself or any one else, a sentiment 
of the like nature." He was cut to the quick that his 
own officers should deem him an adventurer, willing to 
advance his own power at the expense of the very 
principles he had fought for. His thought must have 
gone back at a bound to his old comradeship with his 
brother Lawrence, with the Fairfaxes, George Mason, 
and the Lees, and all that free company of gentlemen 



THE STRESS OF VICTORY 221 

in the Northern Neck who revered law, loved liberty, 
and hated a usurper. 

But he could not blink the just complaints and real 
grievances of the array ; nor did he wish to. Though 
others were angry after a manner he scorned, no man's 
grief or indignation was deeper than his that the army 
should be left penniless after all it had suffered and 
done, and be threatened, besides, with being turned 
adrift without reward or hope of provision for the fut- 
ure. " No man possesses a more sincere wish to see 
ample justice done to the army than I do," he had de- 
clared to Colonel Nicola ; " and as far as my power and 
influence, in a constitutional way, extend, they shall be 
employed to the utmost of my abilities to effect it." 
The pledge was fulfilled in almost every letter he wrote, 
private or public. He urged the states, as he urged 
the congress, in season and out of season, to see justice 
done the men who had won the .Revolution, and whom 
he loved as if they had been of his own blood. But 
even his great voice went too long unheeded. " The 
spirit of party, private interest, slowness, and national 
indolence slacken, suspend, and overthrow the best con- 
certed measures," the Abbe Robin had observed, upon 
his first coming with Rochambeau ; and now meas- 
ures were not so much as concerted until a final menace 
from the army brought the country to its senses. A 
troubled summer came and went, and another winter of 
anxious doubt and ineffectual counsel. The very ap- 
proach of peace, as it grew more certain, quickened the 
angry fears of the army, lest peace should be made a 
pretext, when it came, to disperse them before their de- 
mands could be driven home upon the demoralized and 
reluctant government they were learning to despise. 



222 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

Another spring and the mischief so long maturing was 
ripe ; it looked as if even Washington could not prevent 
it. It had been rumored in Philadelphia, while the 
winter held, " that the army had secretly determined 
not to lay down their arms until due provision and a 
satisfactory prospect should be afforded on the subject 
of their pay," and that Washington had grown unpop- 
ular among almost all ranks because of his harshness 
against every unlawful means of securing justice. " His 
extreme reserve, mixed sometimes with a degree of as- 
perity of temper, both of which were said to have in- 
creased of late, had contributed to the decline of his 
popularity " — so ran the report — and it grew every 
week the more unlikely he could check the treasonable 
purposes of his men. 

In March, 1783, the mine was sprung ; and then men 
learned, by a new sign, what power there was in the 
silent man : how he could handle disaffection and dis- 
arm reproach. An open address was spread broadcast 
through the camp, calling upon the army to use its 
power to obtain its rights, and inviting a meeting of the 
officers to devise a way. " Can you consent to be the 
only sufferers by this Revolution? ... If you can, . . go, 
. . carry with you the ridicule, and, what is worse, the 
pity of the world. Go, starve, and be forgotten. . . . 
But if you have sense enough to discover, and spirit 
enough to oppose, tyranny, . . awake ; attend to your 
situation, and redress yourselves." Such were its kind- 
ling phrases ; and no man need deceive himself with 
thinking they would go unheeded. Washington showed 
his tact and mastery by assuming immediate control of 
the movement, with a sharp rebuke for such a breach 
of manly propriety and soldierly discipline, but with no 



THE STRESS OF VICTORY 223 

thought to stay a righteous protest. He himself sum- 
moned the officers ; and when they had come together 
stepped to the desk before them, with no show of anger 
or offended dignity, bat very gravely, with a sort of 
majesty it moved one strangely to see, and taking a 
written paper from his pocket, adjusted his spectacles 
to read it. " Gentlemen," he said, very simply, " you 
will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not 
only grown gray, but almost blind, in the service of my 
country." There were wet eyes upon the instant in the 
room ; no man stirred while he read — read words of 
admonition, of counsel, and of hope which burned at 
the ear; and when he was done, and had withdrawn, 
leaving them to do what they would, they did nothing 
of which he could be ashamed. They spoke manfully, 
as was right, of what they deemed it just and impera- 
tive the congress should do for them; but they "Re 
solved, unanimously, that at the commencement of the 
present war the officers of the American army engaged 
in the service of their country from the purest love and 
attachment to the rights and liberties of human nature, 
which motives still exist in the highest degree ; and that 
no circumstances of distress or danger shall induce a 
conduct that may tend to sully the reputation and glory 
which they have acquired at the price of their blood 
and eight years' faithful services." 

Washington knew, nevertheless, how black a danger 
lurked among these distressed men ; did not fail to 
speak plainly of it to the congress ; and breathed freely 
again only when the soldiers' just demands had at last 
• in some measure been met, by at any rate the proper 
legislation. He grew weary with longing for peace, 
when the work seemed done and his thoughts had lei- 



224 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

sure to turn towards his home again. But once in all 
the lengthened days of fighting had he seen Mount 
Vernon. He had turned aside to spend a night or two 
there on his way to Yorktown, and he had seen the 
loved place again for a little after the victory was won. 
Now, amidst profitless days at Newburgh, or in counsel 
with the committees of the congress upon business that 
was never finished, while aifairs stood as it were in a 
sort of paralysis, waiting upon the interminable confer- 
ences of the three powers who haggled over definitive 
terms of peace at Paris, home seemed to him, in his 
weariness, more to be desired than ever before. Pri- 
vate griefs had stricken him at the very moment of his 
triumph. Scarcely had the victory at Yorktown been 
celebrated when he was called (November, 1781) to the 
death-bed of Jack Custis, his wayward but dearly loved 
step-son, and had there to endure the sight of his wife's 
grief and the young widow's hopeless sorrow added to 
his own. The two youngest children he claimed for 
himself, with that wistful fatherly longing that had al- 
ways marked him ; and Mount Yernon seemed to him 
more like a haven than ever, where to seek rest and 
solace. The two years he had yet to wait may well 
have seemed to him the longest of his life, and may 
have added a touch of their own to what strangers 
deemed his sternness. 

He had seldom seemed so stern, indeed, as in one 
incident of those trying months. An officer of the 
American army had been taken in a skirmish, and the 
English had permitted a brutal company of loyalists, 
under one Captain Lippincott, to take him from his 
prison in New York and wantonly hang him in broad 
daylight on the heights near Middletown. Washington 



THE STRESS OF VICTORY 225 

at once notified the British commander that unless the 
murderers were delivered up to be punished, a British 
officer would be chosen by lot from among his prisoners 
to suffer in their stead ; and, when reparation was with- 
held, proceeded without hesitation to carry his threat 
into execution. The lot fell upon Captain Charles As- 
gill, an engaging youth of only nineteen, the heir of a 
great English family. Lady Asgill, the lad's mother, 
did not stop short of moving the very French court it- 
self to intervene to save her son, and at last the con- 
gress counselled his release, the English commander 
having disavowed the act of the murderers in whose 
place he was to suffer, and Washington himself having 
asked to be directed what he should do. " Captain As- 
gill has been released," Washington wrote to Vergennes, 
in answer to the great minister's intercession. " I have 
no right to assume any particular merit from the lenient 
manner in which this disagreeable affair has terminated. 
But I beg you to believe, sir, that I most sincerely re- 
joice, not only because }^our humane intentions are grat- 
ified, but because the event accords with the wishes of 
his Most Christian Majesty." It lifted a great weight 
from his heart to have the innocent boy go unhurt from 
his hands, and he wrote almost tenderly to him in ac- 
quainting him with his release; but it was of his simple 
nature to have sent the lad to the gallows, nevertheless, 
had things continued to stand as they were at the first. 
He was inexorable to check perfidy and vindicate the 
just rules of war. Men were reminded, while the affair 
pended, of the hanging of Andre, Arnold's British con- 
federate in treason, and how pitiless the commander-in- 
chief had seemed in sending the frank, accomplished, 
lovable gentleman to his disgraceful death, like any 

15 



226 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

common spy, granting him not even the favor to be 
shot, like a soldier. It seemed hard to learn the inflex- 
ible lines upon which that consistent mind worked, as if 
it had gone to school to Fate. 

But no one deemed him hard or stern, or so much as 
a thought more or less than human, when at last the 
British had withdrawn from New York, and he stood 
amidst his officers in Fraunce's Tavern to say good-bye. 
He could hardly speak for emotion : he could only lift 
his glass and say : " With a heart fall of love and grati- 
tude, I now take my leave of you, most devoutly wish- 
ing that your latter days may be as prosperous and 
happy as your former ones have been glorious and hon- 
orable. ... I cannot come to each of you and take my 
leave," he said, " but shall be obliged if you will come 
and take me by the hand." When General Knox, who 
stood nearest, approached him, he drew him to him with 
a sudden impulse and kissed him, and not a soldier 
among them all went away without an embrace from 
this man who was deemed cold and distant. After the 
parting they followed him in silence to Whitehall Ferry, 
and saw him take boat for his journey. 

And then, standing before the congress at Annapolis 
to resign his commission, he added the crowning touch 
of simplicity to his just repute as a man beyond others 
noble and sincere. " I have now the honor of offering 
my sincere congratulations to congress," he said, as he 
stood amidst the august scene they had prepared for 
him, "and of presenting myself before them to sur- 
render into their hands the trust committed to me, and 
to claim the indulgence of retiring from the service of 
my country. Happy in the confirmation of our inde- 
pendence and sovereignty, and pleased with the op- 



THE STRESS OF VICTORY 227 

portunity afforded the United States of becoming a 
respectable nation, I resign with satisfaction the ap- 
pointment I accepted with diffidence — a diffidence in 
my abilities to accomplish so arduous a task, which, 
however, was superseded by a confidence in the recti- 
tude of our cause, the support of the supreme power of 
the Union, and the patronage of Heaven. The success- 
ful termination of the war has verified the most sanguine 
expectations ; and my gratitude for the interposition of 
Providence and the assistance I have received from my 
countrymen increases with every review of the momen- 
tous contest. ... I consider it my indispensable duty 
to close this last solemn act of my official life by com- 
mending the interests of our dearest country to the pro- 
tection of Almighty God, and those who have the super- 
intendence of them to His holy keeping." It was as if 
spoken on the morrow of the day upon which he accept- 
ed his commission : the same diffidence, the same trust 
in a power greater and higher than his own. The 
plaudits that had but just now filled his ears at every 
stage of his long journey from New York seemed utterly 
forgotten ; he seemed not to know how his fellow coun- 
trymen had made of him an idol and a hero ; his simplic- 
ity was once again his authentic badge of genuineness. 
He knew, it would seem, no other way in which to act. 
A little child remembered afterwards how he had prayed 
at her father's house upon the eve of battle ; how he had 
taken scripture out of Joshua, and had cried, " The Lord 
God of gods, the Lord God of gods, He knoweth, and 
Israel he shall know ; if it be in rebellion, or if in trans- 
gression against the Lord (save us not this day)." There 
was here the same note of solemnity and of self-forget- 
ful devotion, as if duty and honor were alike inevitable. 



228 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

On Christmas Eve, 1783, he was once more at Mount 
Vernon, to resume the life he loved more than victory 
and power. lie had a zest for the means and the labor 
of succeeding, but not for the mere content of success. 
He put the Revolution behind him as he would have laid 
aside a book that was read ; turned from it as quietly as 
he had turned from receiving the surrender of Cornwal- 
lis at Yorktown — interested in victory not as a pageant 
and field of glory, but only as a means to an end. He 
looked to find very sweet satisfaction in the peace which 
war had earned, as sufficient a scope for his powers at 
home as in the field. Once more he would be a Vir- 
ginian, and join his strength to his neighbors' in all the 
tasks of good citizenship. He had seen nothing of the 
old familiar places since that far-away spring of the 
year 1775, when he had left his farming and his fox- 
hunting, amidst rumors of war, to attend the congress 
which was to send him to Cambridge. He had halted 
at Fredericksburg, indeed, with the Count de Rocham- 
beau, two years ago, ere he followed his army from 
York to its posts upon the Hudson. Mrs. Lewis, his 
sister, had returned one day from visiting a neighbor in 
the quiet town to look in astonishment upon an officer's 
horses and attendants at her door, and had entered to 
find her beloved brother stretched upon her own bed 
within, sound asleep in his clothes, like a boy returned 
from hunting. There had been a formal ball given, too, 
in celebration of the victory, before the French officers 
and the commander-in-chief left Fredericksburg to go 
northward again, and Washington had had the joy of 
entering the room in the face of the gay company with 
his aged mother on his arm, not a whit bent for all her 
seventy-four years, and as quiet as a queen at receiving 



THE STRESS OF VICTORY 



229 



the homage of her son's comrades in arms. He had got 
his imperious spirit of command from her. A servant 
had told her that " Mars George " had put up at the tav- 
ern. "Go and tell George to come here instantly," 
she had commanded ; and he had come, masterful man 
though he was. He had felt every old affection and 
every old allegiance renew itself as he saw former neigh- 
bors crowd around him ; and that little glimpse of Vir- 
ginia had refreshed him like a tonic — deeply, and as if 
it renewed his very nature, as only a silent man can 
be refreshed. But a few days in Fredericksburg and 
at Mount Vernon then had been only an incident of 
campaigning, only a grateful pause on a march. Now 
at last he had come back to keep his home and be a 
neighbor again, as he had not been these nine years. 




FIKST IN PEACE 



chapte: 

same Virginia, nor even the same 
home and neighborhood he had gone from, that Wash- 
_:on came 1 -.en the war was done. He had 

left Mount Vernon in the care of Lund "Washington, his 
nephew, while the war las&e . and had not forge 
amidst all fa r writing rec- 

s and maintain a constant oversight upon the man- 
_ rnent of his es: te It was part of his genius to find 
time for everything: and Mount Vernon had - 

rthing less than the ordinary hazards and _ 
of war. It had suffered less upon one t 
than its proud owner could have found it in his heart 
to wish. In the spring of 1781 several British vess s 
had come pillaging within the Potomac, and the anx- 
ious Lund had regaled their officers with refreshm 
from Mount Vernon to buy them off from mischief. 
•• It would have been a less painful circumstance * 

> uncompromising uncle had written him. 
have heard that, in consequence of your non-compliance 
with their request, they had burnt my house and laid 
the plantation in ruin. You ought to have considered 
yourself as my representative.'' Kept though it 
from harm, he :he place had suffered many 

things for lack of his personal care. There -xas some 
part of the be done over again that had con- 



234 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

fronted him when he came to take possession of the 
old plantation with his bride after the neglects of the 
French war. 

But Virginia was more changed than Mount Yernon. 
He had left it a colony, at odds with a royal Governor; 
he returned to find it a State, with Benjamin Harrison, 
that stout gentleman and good planter, for Governor, 
by the free suffrages of his fellow Virginians. There 
had been no radical break with the aristocratic tradi- 
tions of the past. Mr. Harrison's handsome seat at 
Lower Brandon lay where the long reaches of the James 
marked the oldest regions of Virginia's life upon broad, 
half-feudal estates ; where there were good wine and 
plate upon the table, and gentlemen kept old customs 
bright and honored in the observance. But the face 
of affairs had greatly changed, nevertheless. The old 
generation of statesmen had passed away, almost with 
the colony, and a younger generation was in the saddle, 
notwithstanding a gray-haired figure here and there. 
Bichard Bland had died in the year of the Declaration ; 
Peyton Randolph had not lived to see it. Edmund 
Pendleton, after presiding over Virginia's making as a 
State, as chairman of her revolutionary Committee of 
Safety, was now withdrawn from active affairs to the 
bench, his fine figure marred by a fall from his horse, 
his old power as an advocate transmuted into the cooler 
talents of the judge. Patrick Henry, the ardent leader 
of the Revolution, had been chosen the State's first 
Governor, in the year of the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence ; three years later Thomas Jefferson had suc- 
ceeded him in the office, the philosophical radical of 
times of change ; the choice of Mr. Harrison had but 
completed the round of the new variety in affairs. Men 



FIRST IN PEACE 235 

who, like Eichard Henry Lee, had counselled revolution 
and the breaking of old bonds, were now in all things 
at the front of the State's business ; and younger men, 
of a force and power of origination equal to their own, 
were pressing forward, as if to hurry a new generation 
to the stage which had known nothing but indepen- 
dence and a free field for statesmanship. Among the 
rest, James Madison, only a little more than ten years 
out of college, but already done with serving his no- 
vitiate in the Congress of the Confederation, a pub- 
licist and leader in the Old Dominion at thirty-two. 
Edmund Eandolph, of the new generation of the com- 
monwealth's great family of lawyers, like his forebears 
in gifts and spirit, was already received, at thirty, into 
a place of influence among public men. John Marshall, 
just turned of twenty-eight, but a veteran of the long 
war none the less, having been at the thick of the fight- 
ing, a lieutenant and a captain among the Virginian 
forces, from the time Dunmore was driven from Nor- 
folk till the eve of Yorktown, was, now that that duty 
was done, a lawyer in quiet Fauquier, drawing to him- 
self the eyes of every man who had the perception to 
note qualities of force and leadership. James Monroe 
had come out of the war at twenty -five to go at once 
into the public councils of his State, an equal among his 
elders. Young men came forward upon every side to 
take their part in the novel rush of affairs that followed 
upon the heels of revolution. 

Washington found himself no stranger in the new 
State, for all it had grown of a sudden so unlike that 
old community in which his own life had been formed. 
He found a very royal welcome awaiting him at his 
home-coming. The old commonwealth loved a hero 



236 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

still as much as ever; was as loyal to him now as it 
had been in the far-away days of the French war, when 
Dinwiddie alone fretted against him ; received him 
with every tribute of affection ; offered him gifts, and 
loved him all the better for refusing them. But he 
must have felt that a deep change had come upon his 
life, none the less, and even upon his relations with his 
old familiars and neighbors. He had gone away hon- 
ored indeed, and marked for responsible services among 
his people — a Burgess as a matter of course, a notable 
citizen, whose force no man who knew him could fail 
to remark ; but by no means accounted greatest, even 
among the men who gathered for the colony's business 
at Williamsburg; chosen only upon occasion for spe- 
cial services of action ; no debater or statesman, so far 
as ordinary men could see ; too reserved to be popular 
with the crowd, though it should like his frankness 
and taking address, and go out of its way to see him 
on horseback ; a man for his neighbors, who could know 
him, not for the world, w 7 hich he refused to court. But 
the war had suddenly lifted him to the view of all 
mankind ; had set him among the great captains of the 
world ; had marked him a statesman in the midst of 
affairs — more a statesman than a soldier even, men 
must have thought who had read his letters or heard 
them read in Congress, on the floor or in the commit- 
tee rooms ; had drawn to himself the admiration of the 
very men he had been fighting, the very nation whose 
dominion he had helped to cast off. He had come home 
perhaps the most famous man of his day, and could 
not take up the old life where he had left it off, much 
as he wished to ; was obliged, in spite of himself, to 
play a new part in affairs. 



FIRST IN PEACE 237 

For a few weeks, indeed, after he had reached Mount 
Vernon, Nature herself assisted him to a little privacy 
and real retirement. The winter (1783-4) was an un- 
commonly severe one. Snow lay piled, all but impas- 
sable, upon the roads; frosts hardened all the country 
against travel ; he could not get even to Fredericksburg 
to see his aged mother ; and not many visitors, though 
they were his near neighbors, could reach him at Mount 
Vernon. " At length, my dear Marquis," he could write 
to Lafayette in his security, " I am become a private 
citizen on the banks of the Potomac ; and under the 
shadow of my own vine and my own fig-tree, free from 
the bustle of a camp and the busy scenes of public life, 
I am solacing myself with those tranquil enjoyments 
of which the soldier, who is ever in pursuit of fame, the 
statesman, whose watchful days and sleepless nights are 
spent in devising schemes to promote the welfare of his 
own, perhaps the ruin of other countries, as if this globe 
was insufficient for us all, and the courtier, who is al- 
ways watching the countenance of his prince, can have 
very little conception. I have not only retired from 
all public employments, but I am retiring within myself. 
. . . Envious of none, I am determined to be pleased 
with all ; and this, my dear friend, being the order of 
my march, I will move gently down the stream of time 
until I sleep with my fathers." The simple gentleman 
did not yet realize what the breaking up of the frosts 
would bring. 

With the spring the whole life of the world seemed to 
come pouring in upon him. Men of note everywhere 
pressed their correspondence upon him ; no stranger 
visited America but thought first of Mount Vernon in 
planning where he should go and what he should see; 



238 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

new friends and old sat every day at his table ; a year 
and a half had gone by since his home-coming before he 
could note in his diary (June 30th, 1785) : " Dined with 
only Mrs. Washington, which, I believe, is the first in- 
stance of it since my retirement from public life" — for 
some visitors had broken their way even through the 
winter roads. Authors sent him what they wrote; in- 
ventors submitted their ideas and models to him ; every- 
thing that was being said, everything that was being 
done, seemed to find its way, if nowhere else, to Mount 
Yernon — till those who knew his occupations could 
speak of Washington, very justly, as " the focus of polit- 
ical intelligence for the New World." He would not 
alter his way of living even in the face of such over- 
whelming interruptions. His guests saw him for a lit- 
tle after dinner, and once and again, it might be, in the 
evening also ; but he kept to his business throughout 
all the working hours of the day ; was at his desk even 
before breakfast, and after breakfast was always early 
in the saddle and off to his farms. 

Only at table did he play the host, lingering over the 
wine to give and call for toasts and relax in genial con- 
versation, losing, as the months passed by, some of the 
deep gravity that had settled upon him in the camp, 
and showing once more an enjoying relish for " a pleas- 
ant story, an unaffected sally of wit, or a burlesque de- 
scription," as in the old days after hunting. Strangers 
were often in awe of him. It did not encourage talk in 
those who had little to say to sit in the presence of a 
man who so looked his greatness in the very proportions 
of his strong figure even, and whose grave and steady 
eyes so challenged the significance of what was said. 
Young people would leave off dancing and romping 



FIRST IN PEACE 239 

when he came into the room, and force him to with- 
draw, and peep at the fun from without the door, unob- 
served. It was only among his intimates that he was 
suffered and taken to be the simple, straightforward, 
sympathizing man he was, exciting, not awe, but only a 
warm and affectionate allegiance. " The General, with 
a few glasses of champagne, got quite merry," a young 
Englishman could report who had had the good luck 
to be introduced by Richard Henry Lee, " and, being 
with his intimate friends, laughed and talked a good 
deal." 

As much as he could, he resumed the old life, and the 
thoughts and pastimes that had gone with it. Once 
more he became the familiar of his hounds at the ken- 
nels, and followed them as often as might be in the 
hunt at sunrise. He asked but one thing of a horse, as 
of old, "and that was to go along. He ridiculed the 
idea that he could be unhorsed, provided the animal 
kept on his legs." The two little children, a tiny boy 
and a romping, mischievous lassie, not much bigger, 
Avhom he had adopted at Jack Custis's death-bed, took 
strong hold upon his heart, and grew slowly to an inti- 
macy with him such as few ventured to claim any longer 
amidst those busy days in the guest-crowded house. It 
seemed to Lafayette a very engaging picture when he 
saw Washington and the little toddling boy together — 
" a very little gentleman with a feather in his hat, hold- 
ing fast to one finger of the good General's remarkable 
hand, which (so large that hand!)" was all the tiny fel- 
low could manage. These children took Washington 
back more completely than anything else to the old 
days when he had brought his bride home with her own 
little ones. He felt those days come back, too, when he 



240 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

was on his horse in the open, going the round of good 
twelve miles and more that carried him to all the quar- 
ters of his plantation. 

Once more he was the thorough farmer, ransacking 
books, when men. and his own observation failed him, 
to come at the best methods of cultivation. Once more 
he took daily account of the character of his slaves and 
servants, and of the progress of their work, talking with 
them when he could, and gaining a personal mastery 
over them. Contracts for work he drew up with his 
own hand, with a minuteness and particularity which 
were sometimes whimsical and shot through with a 
gleam of grim humor. He agreed with Philip Barter 
that if he would serve him faithfully as gardener and 
keep sober at all other times, he would allow him " four 
dollars at Christmas, with which to be drunk four days 
and four nights ; two dollars at Easter, to effect the 
same purpose; two dollars at Whitsuntide, to be drunk 
for two days ; a dram in the morning, and a drink of 
grog at dinner, at noon"; and the contract was drawn, 
signed, and witnessed with all formality. Philip no 
doubt found short shrift of consideration from his 
thorough -going master if there was any drunkenness 
in the garden beyond the limit of the eight days nomi- 
nated in the bond, and found the contract no jest in the 
end, for Washington had small patience and no soft 
words for a breach of agreement, whatever its kind. 
He would help men in distress with a generosity and 
wise choice of means which few took the pains to exer- 
cise, but he had only sharp rebuke for carelessness or 
neglect or any slackness in the performance of a duty. 
Men who had cheated or sought to impose upon him 
deemed him harsh and called him a hard master, so 



FIRST IN PEACE 241 

sharply did they smart after he had reckoned with 
them. He exacted the uttermost farthing. But he 
spent it, with the other hand, to relieve genuine suffer- 
ing and real want, though it were deserved and the fruit 
of a crying fault. In his home dealings, as in every- 
thing else, his mind kept that trait by which men had 
been awed in the camp — that trick, as if of Fate, of 
letting every act come at its consequences and its full 
punishment or reward, as if he but presided at a process 
which was just Nature's own. When he succored dis- 
tress, he did it in pity, not in justice — not excusing fault, 
but giving leave to mercy. If he urged the government 
to pension and reward the soldiers of the war, who had 
only done their duty, he himself set an example. There 
were black pensioners not a few about his own home- 
stead. Bishop, his old body-servant, lived like a retired 
gentleman in his cottage there; even Nelson, the good 
sorrel who had borne him so bravely in the field till 
Yorktown, now went forever unsaddled, free in his own 
pasture. 

But, much as he loved his home and courted retire- 
ment amidst the duties of a planter, the old life would 
not come back, was gone forever. He was too famous, 
and there w T as an end on 't. He could not go abroad 
without drawing crowds about him. If he attended 
service on a Sunday away from home, though it were in 
never so quiet a parish, the very walls of the church 
groaned threateningly under the unaccustomed weight 
of people gathered in the galleries and packed upon the 
floor to see the hero of the Revolution. Not even a ride 
into the far west, to view his lands and pull together 
his neglected business on the Ohio, was long enough to 
take him beyond the reach of public affairs. On the 



242 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

1st of September, 1784, with Dr. Craik for company, he 
set out on horseback to go by Braddock's road again 
into the west. For nearly five weeks he was deep in 
the wilderness, riding close upon seven hundred miles 
through the forested mountains, and along the remote 
courses of the long rivers that ran into the Mississippi ; 
camping out as in the old days when he was a surveyor 
and a soldier in his 'prenticeship in these very wilds; re- 
newing his zest for the rough life and the sudden advent- 
ures of the frontiersman. But, though he had come 
upon his own lousiness, it was the seat of a future em- 
pire he saw rather than his own acres scattered here 
and there. 

When last he had ridden the long stages from settle- 
ment to settlement and cabin to cabin in this far coun- 
try of the Ohio, he had been a Virginian and nothing 
more, a colonial colonel merely, come to pick out lands 
for his comrades and himself, their reward for serving 
the crown against the French. A transformation had 
been worked upon him since then. He had led the 
armies of the whole county; had been the chief instru- 
ment of a new nation in winning independence ; had 
carried its affairs by his own counsels as no other man 
had done ; had seen through all the watches of those 
long campaigns the destinies and the hopes that were 
at stake. Now he saw the crowding immigrants come 
into the west with a new solicitude he had not felt be- 
fore. A new vision was in his thought. This western 
country was now a "rising world," to be kept or lost, 
husbanded or squandered, by the raw nation he had 
helped put upon its feet. His thought was stretched at 
last to a continental measure ; problems of statesman- 
ship that were national, questions of policy that had a 



FIRST IN PEACE 243 

scope great as schemes of empire, stood foremost in his 
view. He returned home more engrossed than ever b} T 
interests not his own, but central to public affairs, and 
of the very stuff of politics. 

And so not the letters merely which poured in with 
every mail, not only his host of visitors, great and small 
— the Governor of the State, the President of Congress, 
foreign noblemen, soldiers, diplomatists, travellers, 
neighbors, friends, acquaintances, intruders — but his 
own unbidden thoughts as well, and the very sugges- 
tions of his own interest as a citizen and land-owner, 
drew him from his dreams of retirement and forced him 
upon the open stage again. Even hunting ceased be- 
fore many seasons were out. The savage boar-hounds 
which Lafayette had sent, in his kindness, from the Old 
World, proved too fierce and great a breed for even the 
sharp sport with the gray fox ; the old hunting com- 
panions were gone — the Fairfaxes over sea ; Belvoir de- 
serted and burned ; George Mason too much engaged — 
none but boys and strangers left to ride with. 'Twas 
poor sport, after all, without the right sportsmen. It 
must needs give way before a statesman's cares. 

Upon his first home-coming, Washington had found it 
hard to break himself of his habit of waking very early 
in the morning with a sense of care concerning the af- 
fairs of the clay, as if he were still in camp and in the 
midst of public duties. Now a new sense of responsi- 
bility possessed him, and more and more gained ascen- 
dency over him. He began to feel a deep anxiety lest a 
weak government should make independence little bet- 
ter than a reproach, and the country should fall into a 
hopeless im potency. At first he had been very san- 
guine. "Notwithstanding the jealous and contracted 



244 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

temper which seems to prevail in some of the States," 
he wrote to Jonathan Trumbull in January, 1784, "yet 
I cannot but hope and believe that the good sense of 
the people will ultimately get the better of their preju- 
dices, and that order and sound policy, though they do 
not come so soon as one could wish, will be produced 
from the present unsettled and deranged state of public 
affairs. . . . Everything, my dear Trumbull, will come 
right at last, as we have often prophesied. My onl} 7 
fear is that we shall lose a little reputation first." But 
the more he observed the temper of the time, the more 
uneasy he grew. " Like a young heir," he cried, " come 
a little prematurely to a large inheritance, we -shall 
wanton and run riot until we have brought our reputa- 
tion to the brink of ruin, and then, like him, shall have 
to labor with the current of opinion, when compelled, 
perhaps, to do what prudence and common policy point- 
ed out, as plain as any problem in Euclid, in the first 
instance. ... I think we have opposed Great Britain, 
and have arrived at the present state of peace and in- 
dependency, to very little purpose, if w T e cannot con- 
quer our own prejudices." 

For the present he saw little that could be done be- 
yond holding up the hands of the Congress, and increas- 
ing, as it might prove possible to do so, the meagre 
powers of the Confederation. " My political creed," he 
said, " is to be wise in the choice of delegates, support 
them like gentlemen while they are our representatives, 
give them competent powers for all federal purposes, 
support them in the due exercise thereof, and, lastly, to 
compel them to close attendance in Congress during 
their delegation." But his thoughts took wider scope as 
the months passed ; and nothing quickened them more 



FIRST IN PEACE 



245 



than his western trip. He saw how much of the future 
travelled with those slow wagon trains of immigrants into 
the west ; realized how they were leaving behind them 
the rivers that ran to the old ports at the sea, and going 
down into the valleys whose outlet was the great high- 
way of the Mississippi and the ports of the Gulf; how 
the great ridge of the Alleghanies lay piled between 
them and the older seats of settlement, with only here 
and there a gap to let a road through, only here and 
there two rivers lying close enough at their sources to 
link the east with the west ; and the likelihood of a 
separation between the two populations seemed to him 
as obvious as the tilt of the mountains upon either 
slope. " There is nothing which binds one country or 
one State to another but interest," he said. " Without 
this cement the western inhabitants, who more than 
probably will be composed in a great degree of foreign- 
ers, can have no predilection for us, and. a commercial 
connection is the only tie we can have upon them." 
" The western settlers," he declared, while still fresh 
from the Ohio, " stand as it were upon a pivot. The 
touch of a feather would turn them any way " — down 
the Mississippi to join their interests with those of the 
Spaniard, or back to the mountain roads and the head- 
waters of the eastern streams, to make for themselves 
a new allegiance in the east. He was glad to see the 
Spaniard so impolitic as to close the Mississippi against 
the commerce offered him, and hoped that things might 
stand so until there should have been " a little time al- 
lowed to open and make easy the ways between the At- 
lantic States and the western territory." 

The opening of the upper reaches of the Potomac to 
navigation had long been a favorite object with "Wash- 



246 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

ington; now it seemed nothing less than a necessity. 
It had been part of the original scheme of the old Ohio 
Company to use this means of winning a way for com- 
merce through the mountains. Steps had been taken 
more than twenty years ago to act in the matter through 
private subscription ; and active measures for securing 
the necessary legislation from the Assemblies of Vir- 
ginia and Maryland were still in course when Washing- 
ton was called to Cambridge and revolution drew men's 
minds imperatively off from the business. In 1770 
Washington had written to Jefferson of the project as 
a means of opening a channel for " the extensive trade 
of a rising empire"; now the empire of which he had 
had a vision was no longer Britain's, but America's 
own, and it was become a matter of exigent political 
necessity to keep that western country against estrange- 
ment, winning it by commerce and close sympathy to 
join itself with the old colonies in building up a free 
company of united States upon the great continent. 

Already the west was astir for the formation of new 
States. Virginia had taken the broad and national 
view of her duty that Washington himself held, and 
had ceded to the Confederation all her ancient claims 
to the lands that lay northwest of the Ohio River, re- 
serving for herself only the fair region that stretched 
south of that great stream, from her own mountains to 
the Mississippi. North Carolina would have ceded her 
western lands beyond the mountains also, had they been 
empty and unclaimed, like the vast territory that lay 
beyond the Ohio. But for many a year settlers had 
been crossing the mountains into those fertile valleys, 
and both this region and that which Virginia still kept 
showed many a clearing now and many a rude hamlet 



FIRST IN PEACE 247 

where hardy frontiersmen were making a new home for 
civilization. Rather than be handed over to Congress, 
to be disposed of by an authority which no one else was 
bound to obey, North Carolina's western settlers de- 
clared they would form a State of their own, and North 
Carolina had to recall her gift of their lands to the 
Confederation before their plans of defiance could be 
checked and defeated. Virginia found her own fron- 
tiersmen no less ready to take the initiative in whatever 
affair touched their interest. Spain offered the United 
States trade at her ports, but refused to grant them the 
use of the lower courses of the Mississippi, lest terri- 
torial aggression should be pushed too shrewdly in that 
quarter ; and news reached the settlers beyond the 
mountains, in the far counties of North Carolina and 
Virginia, that Mr. Jay, the Confederation's Secretary for 
Foreign Affairs, had proposed to the Congress to yield 
the navigation of the Mississippi for a generation in ex- 
change for trade on the seas. They flatly declared they 
would give themselves, and their lands too, into the 
hands of England again rather than submit to be so 
robbed, cramped, and deserted. The New England 
States, on their part, threatened to withdraw from the 
Confederation if treaties were to be made to wait upon 
the assent of frontiersmen on the far Mississippi. 

The situation was full of menace of no ordinary sort. 
It could profit the Confederation little that great States 
like Virginia and New York had grown magnanimous, 
and were endowing the Confederation with vast gifts of 
territory in the west, if such gifts were but to loosen 
still further the already slackened bonds of the common 
government, leaving settlers in the unclaimed lands no 
allegiance they could respect. Without a national gov- 



248 



GEORGE WASHINGTON 



ernment spirited and strong enough to frame policies 
and command obedience, " we shall never establish a 
national character or be considered as on a respectable 
footing by the powers of Europe," Washington had said 
from the first. He had made a most solemn appeal to 
the States in his last circular to them, ere he resigned 
his commission, urging them to strengthen the powers 
of Congress, put faction and jealousy away, and make 
sure of " an indissoluble union under one federal head." 
" An option is still left to the United States of Amer- 
ica," he had told them, with all his plain and stately elo- 
quence ; " it is in their choice, and depends upon their 
conduct, whether they will be respectable and prosper- 
ous, or contemptible and miserable, as a nation. This is 
the time of their political probation." The hazards of 
that probation had been a burden upon his heart through 
all the toil of the Kevolution, and now it seemed as if 
the States must needs make every evil choice in meet- 
ing them. Congress could not so much as carry out the 
provisions of the treaty of peace, for its commissioners 
had made promises in the name of the States which the 
States would not redeem. England consequently re- 
fused to keep her part of the agreement and relinquish 
the western posts. She levied commercial war against 
the country, besides, without fear of reprisal ; for Con- 
gress had no power to regulate trade, and the States 
were too jealous of each other to co-operate in this or 
any other matter. English statesmen had consented to 
give up the colonies, and recognize their independence 
as a nation, rather than face any longer the world in 
arms; but they now looked to see them presently drop 
back into their hands again, out of sheer helplessness 
and hopeless division in counsel; and there were observ- 



FIRST IN PEACE 249 

ant men in America who deemed the thing possible, 
though it Drought an intolerable fire into their blood to 
think of it. 

Other nations, too, were fast conceiving a like con- 
tempt for the Confederation. It was making no pro- 
vision for the payment of the vast sums of money it had 
borrowed abroad, in France and Holland and Spain ; 
and it could not make any. It could only ask the 
States for money, and must count itself fortunate to get 
enough to pay even the interest on its debts. It was 
this that foreign courts were finding out, that the Con- 
federation was a mere " government of supplication," as 
Randolph had dubbed it ; and its credit broke utterly 
down. Frenchman and Spaniard alike would only have 
laughed in contemptuous derision to see the whole fabric 
go to pieces, and were beginning to interest themselves 
with surmises as to what plunder it would afford. The 
States which lay neighbors to each other were embroiled 
in boundary disputes, and were fallen to levying duties 
on each other's commerce. They were individually in 
debt, besides, and were many of them resorting to issues 
of irredeemable paper money to relieve themselves of 
the inevitable taxation that must sooner or later pay 
their reckonings. " We are either a united people, or 
w r e are not so," cried Washington. "If the former, let 
us in all matters of general concern act as a nation 
which has a national character to support ; if we are 
not, let us no longer act a farce by pretending to it." 
As the months passed it began to look as if the farce 
might be turned into a tragedy. 

The troubles of the country, though he filled his let- 
ters with them and wrung his heart for phrases of pro- 
test and persuasion that would tell effectually in the 



250 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

deep labor of working out the sufficient remedy of a 
roused and united opinion, though he deemed them per- 
sonal to himself, and knew his own fame in danger to be 
undone by them, did not break the steady self-possession 
of Washington's life at Mount Vernon. " It's astonish- 
ing the packets of letters that daily come for him, from 
all parts of the world," exclaimed an English visitor; 
but it was not till he had struggled to keep pace with 
his correspondence unassisted for a year and a half that 
he employed a secretary to help him. " Letters of 
friendship require no study," he wrote to General Knox ; 
"the communications are easy, and allowances are ex- 
pected and made. This is not the case with those that 
require researches, consideration, recollection, and the 
de— 1 knows what to prevent error, and to answer the 
ends for which they are written." He grew almost doc- 
ile, nevertheless, under the gratuitous tasks of courtesy 
thrust upon him. His gallantry, bred in him since a 
boy, the sense of duty to which he was born, his feel- 
ing that what he had done had in some sort committed 
him to serve his countrymen and his friends every- 
where, though it were only in answering questions, dis- 
posed him to sacrifice his comfort and his privacy to 
every one who had the slightest claim upon his atten- 
tion. He even found sitting for his portrait grow easy 
at last. " In for a penny, in for a pound, is an old 
adage," he laughed, writing to Francis Ilopkinson. " I 
am so hackneyed to the touches of the painter's pencil 
that I am now altogether at their beck ; and sit ' like 
Patience on a monument' whilst they are delineating 
the lines of my face. ... At first I was as impatient at 
the request, and as restive under the operation, as a colt 
is of the saddle. The next time I submitted very re- 






FIRST IN PEACE 251 

luctantly, but with less flouncing. Now no dray-horse 
moves more readily to his thill than I do to the painter's 
chair." Besides the failure of the public credit, it con- 
cerned him to note the fact that, though he kept a hun- 
dred cows, he was obliged to buy butter for his innu- 
merable guests. He saw to it that there should be at 
least a very definite and efficient government upon his 
own estate, and, when there was need, put his own hand 
to the work. He "often works with his men himself — 
strips off his coat and labors like a common man," meas- 
ures with his own hands every bit of building or con- 
struction that is going forward, and " shows a great turn 
for mechanics," one of his guests noted, amidst com- 
ments on his greatness and his gracious dignity. It was 
such constancy and candor and spirit in living that took 
the admiration of all men alike upon the instant; and 
his neighbors every day saw here the same strenuous 
and simple gentleman they had known before ever the 
war began. 

It was through the opening of the Potomac, after all 
— the thing nearest his hand — that a way was found to 
cure the country of its malady of weakness and disorder. 
Washington had been chosen president of the Potomac 
Company, that it might have the advantage both of his 
name and of his capacity in affairs ; and he had gone 
upon a tour of inspection, with the directors of the com- 
pany, to the falls of the river in the summer of 1785, 
keeping steadily to the business he had come upon, and 
insisting upon being in fact a private gentleman busy 
with his own affairs, despite the efforts made everywhere 
he went to see and to entertain him ; and it presently 
became evident even to the least sanguine that the 
long-talked-of work was really to be carried through. A 



252 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

visitor at Mount Vernon in the autumn of 1785 found 
Washington " quite pleased at the idea of the Baltimore 
merchants laughing at him, and saying it was a ridicu- 
lous plan, and would never succeed. They begin now, 
says the General, to look a little serious about the mat- 
ter, as they know it must hurt their commerce amaz- 
ingly." 

The scheme had shown its real consequence in the 
spring of that very year, when it brought commissioners 
from the two States that lay upon the river together in 
conference to devise plans of co-operation. Both Vir- 
ginia and Maryland had appointed commissioners, and 
a meeting had been set for March, 1785, at Alexandria. 
For some reason the Virginian commissioners were not 
properly notified of the place and time of conference. 
The meeting was held, nevertheless, a minority of the 
Virginian commissioners being present ; and, as if to 
give it more the air of a cordial conference of neigh- 
bors, Washington invited the representatives of both 
States to adjourn from Alexandria to Mount Vernon. 
There they sat, his guests, from Friday to Monday. He 
was not formally of the commission ; but conference 
was not confined to their formal sessions, and his coun- 
sel entered into their determinations. It was evident 
that two States were not enough to decide the questions 
submitted to them. Pennsylvania, at least, must be 
consulted before the full line of trade they sought could 
be drawn from the head -waters of the Ohio to the. 
head -waters of the Potomac; and if three States 
were to consult upon questions of trade which con- 
cerned the whole continent, why should not more be 
invited, and the conference be made general? Such 
was the train of suggestion, certainly, that ran in 



FIRST IN PEACE 253 

Washington's mind, and which the commissioners car- 
ried home with them. Every sign of the time served to 
deepen its significance for Washington. Just before 
quitting the army he had ridden upon a tour of inspec- 
tion into the valley of the Mohawk, where a natural 
way, like this of the Potomac, ran from the northern 
settlements into the west. He knew that the question 
of joining the Potomac with the Ohio was but one 
item of a policy which all the States must consider and 
settle — nothing less than the policy which must make 
them an empire or doom them to remain a weak and 
petty confederacy. 

The commissioners did not put all that they had 
heard at Mount Yernon into their reports to their re- 
spective Assemblies. They recommended only that, 
besides co-operating with each other and with Penn- 
sylvania in opening a waj T to the western waters, Vir- 
ginia and Maryland should adopt a uniform system 
of duties and of commercial regulations, and should es- 
tablish uniform rules regarding their currencv. But 
the Maryland Assembly itself went further. It pres- 
ently informed the Virginian Legislature that it had 
not only adopted the measures recommended by the 
commissioners, but thought it wise to do something 
more. Delaware ought to be consulted, with a view to 
carrying a straight watercourse, by canal, from Chesa- 
peake Bay to the Delaware River; and, since conference 
could do no harm and bind nobody, it would be as well 
to invite all the States to confer with them, for the 
questions involved seemed far-reaching enough to justify 
it, if not to make it necessary. Governor Bowdoin, of 
Massachusetts, had that very year urged his Legislature 
to invite a general convention of the States in the in- 



254 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

terest of trade. The whole country was in a tangle of 
disagreement about granting to Congress the power to 
lay imposts; Gardoqui, it was rumored, was insisting, 
for Spain, upon closing the Mississippi : 'twas evident 
enough conference was needed. Every thoughtful man 
might well pray that it would bring peace and accom- 
modation. When Maryland's suggestion was read in 
the Virginian Assembly, there was prompt acquiescence. 
Virginia asked all the States of the Union (January, 
1786) to send delegates to a general conference to be 
held at Annapolis on the first Monday in September, to 
consider and recommend such additions to the powers 
of Congress as might conduce to a better regulation of 
trade. " There is more wickedness than ignorance in 
the conduct of the States, or, in other words, in the 
conduct of those who have too much influence in the 
government of them," Washington wrote hotly to 
Henry Lee, upon hearing to what lengths contempt of 
the authority of Congress had been carried ; " and until 
the curtain is withdrawn, and the private views and 
selfish principles upon which these men act are exposed 
to public notice, 1 have little hope of amendment with- 
out another convulsion." Perhaps the conference at 
Annapolis would withdraw the curtain and give the 
light leave to work a purification ; and he waited anx- 
iously for the issue. 

But when the commissioners assembled they found 
only five States represented — Virginia, Pennsylvania, 
Delaware, New Jersey, and New York. Maryland had 
suddenly fallen indifferent, and had not appointed dele- 
gates. JSTew Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, 
and North Carolina had appointed delegates, but they 
had not taken the trouble to come. Connecticut, South 



FIRST IN PEACE 255 

Carolina, and Georgia had ignored the call altogether. 
The delegates who were in attendance, besides, had 
come with only the most jealously restricted powers; 
only New Jersey, in her great uneasiness at being 
neighbor to the powerful States of New York and 
Pennsylvania, had authorized her representatives to 
" consider how far a uniform system in their commercial 
regulations and other important matters might be neces- 
sary to the -common interest and permanent harmony 
of the several States." The other delegates had no 
such scope ; all deemed it futile to attempt their busi- 
ness in so small a convention ; and it was resolved to 
make another opportunity. Alexander Hamilton, of 
New York, drew up their address to the States, and in 
it made bold to adopt New Jersey's hint, and ask for a 
conference which should not merely consider questions 
of trade, but also "devise such further provisions as 
should appear to them necessary to render the constitu- 
tion of the federal government adequate to the exigen- 
cies of the Union." Hamilton held with Washington 
for a national government. He had been born, and 
bred as a lad, in the West Indies, and had never re- 
ceived the local pride of any colony-state into his blood. 
He had served with the army, too, in close intimacy 
with Washington, and, though twenty -five years his cap- 
tain's junior, had seen as clearly as he saw the deep 
hazards of a nation's birth. 

The Congress was indifferent, if not hostile, to the 
measures which the address proposed ; and the States 
would have acted on the call as slackly as before, had 
not the winter brought with it something like a threat 
of social revolution, and fairly startled them out of their 
negligent humor. The central counties of Massachu- 



256 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

setts broke into violent rebellion, under one Shays, a 
veteran of the Kevolution — not to reform the govern- 
ment, but to rid themselves of it altogether; to shut 
the courts and escape the payment of debts and taxes. 
The insurgents worked their will for weeks together; 
drove out the officers of the law, burned and plun- 
dered at pleasure through whole districts, living upon 
the land like a hostile army, and were brought to a 
reckoning at last only when a force thousands strong 
had been levied against them. The contagion spread 
to Vermont and New Hampshire ; and, even when 
the outbreak had been crushed, the States concerned 
were irresolute in the punishment of the leaders, 
lihode Island declared her sympathy t with the insur- 
gents ; Vermont offered them asylum ; Massachusetts 
brought the leaders to trial and conviction only to par- 
don and set them free again. Congress dared do no 
more than make covert preparation to check a general 
rising. " You talk, my good sir," wrote Washington to 
Henry Lee, in Congress, "of employing influence to 
appease the present tumults in Massachusetts. I know 
not where that influence is to be found, or, if attainable, 
that it would be a proper remedy for the disorders. 
Influence is no government Let us have one by which 
our lives, liberties, and properties will be secured, ©r let 
us know the worst at once." It was an object-lesson 
for the whole country ; the dullest and the most lethar- 
gic knew now what slack government and financial dis- 
order would produce. The States one and all — save 
Khode Island — bethought them of the convention called 
to meet in Philadelphia on the second Monday in May, 
1787, and delegates were appointed. Even Congress took 
the lesson to heart, and gave its sanction to the conference. 



FIRST IN PEACE 257 

The Legislature of Virginia put Washington's name 
at the head of its own list of delegates, and after his 
name the names of Patrick Henry, Edmund Randolph, 
John Blair, James Madison, George Mason, and George 
Wythe — the leading names of the State, no man could 
doubt. But Washington hesitated. He had already de- 
clined to meet the Society of the Cincinnati in Phila- 
delphia about the same time, he said, and thought it 
would be disrespectful to that body, to whom lie owed 
much, " to be there on any other occasion." He even 
hinted a doubt whether the convention was constitu- 
tional, its avowed purposes being what they were, until 
Congress tardily sanctioned it. His real reason his in- 
timate friends must have divined from the first. They 
knew him better in such matters than he knew himself. 
He not only loved his retirement ; he deemed himself 
a soldier and man of action, and no statesman. The 
floor of assemblies had never seemed to him his princi- 
pal sphere of duty. He had thought of staying away 
from the House of Burgesses on private business twent}^ 
years ago, when he knew that the Stamp Act was to be 
debated. But it was not for the floor of the approach- 
ing convention that his friends wanted him ; they told 
him from the first he must preside. He was known to 
be in favor of giving the Confederation powers that 
would make it a real government, and he thought that 
enough ; but they wanted the whole country to see him 
pledged to the actual work, and, when they had per- 
suaded him to attend, knew that they had at any rate 
won the confidence of the people in their patriotic pur- 
pose. His mere presence would give them power. 

Washington and the other Virginians were prompt 
to be in Philadelphia on the day appointed, but only 
17 



258 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

the Pennsylvania!! delegates were there to meet them. 
They had to wait an anxious week before so many as 
seven States were represented. Meanwhile, those who 
gathered from day to day were nervous and appre- 
hensive, and there was talk of compromise and half- 
way measures, should the convention prove weak or 
threaten to miscarry. They remembered for many a 
long year afterwards how nobly Washington, "standing 
self-collected in the midst of them," had uttered brave 
counsels of wisdom in their rebuke. " It is too prob- 
able," he said, " that no plan we propose will be adopt- 
ed. Perhaps another dreadful conflict is to be sustained. 
If, to please the people, we offer what we ourselves 
disapprove, how can we afterwards defend our work? 
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest 
can repair. The event is in the hand of God." It 
was an utterance, they knew, not of statesmanship 
merely, but of character ; and it was that character, if 
anything could, that would win the people to their sup- 
port. When at last seven States were represented — a 
quorum of the thirteen— an organization was effected, 
and Washington unanimously chosen president of the 
convention. He spoke, when led to the chair, " of the 
novelty of the scene of business in which he was to act, 
lamented his want of better qualifications, and claimed 
the indulgence of the house towards the involuntary 
errors which his inexperience might occasion"; but no 
mere parliamentarian could have given mat anxious 
body such steadiness in business or such grave earnest- 
ness in counsel as it got from his presence and influence 
in the chair. Five more States were in attendance be- 
fore deliberation was very far advanced ; but he had the 
satisfaction to see his own friends lead upon the floor. 



FIRST IN PEACE 259 

It was the plan which Edmund Randolph proposed, for 
his fellow Virginians, which the convention accepted as 
a model to work from ; it was James Madison, that 
young master of counsel, who guided the deliberations 
from day to day, little as he showed his hand in the 
work or seemed to put himself forward in debate. No 
speeches came from the president ; only once or twice 
did he break the decorum of his office to temper some 
difference of opinion or facilitate some measure of ac- 
commodation. It was the 17th of September when the 
convention at last broke up; the 19th when the Consti- 
tution it had wrought out was published to the country. 
All the slow summer through, Washington had kept 
counsel with the rest as to the anxious work that was 
going forward behind the closed doors of the long con- 
ference ; it was a grateful relief to be rid of the painful 
strain, and he returned to Mount Vernon like one whose 
part in the work was done. 

" I never saw him so keen for anything in my life as 
he is for the adoption of the new scheme of govern- 
ment," wrote a visitor at Mount Vernon to Jefferson ; 
but he took no other part than his correspondence af- 
forded him in the agitation for its acceptance. Through- 
out all those long four months in Philadelphia he had 
given his whole mind and energy to every process of 
difficult counsel by which it had been wrought to com- 
pletion ; but he was no politician. Earnestly as he com 
mended the plan to his friends, he took no public part 
either in defence or in advocacy of it. He read not only 
the Federalist papers, in which Hamilton and Madison 
and Jay made their masterly plea for the adoption of 
the Constitution, but also " every performance which 
has been printed on the one side and the other on the 



260 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

great question," he said, so far as he was able to obtain 
them ; and he felt as poignantly as any man the deep 
excitement of the momentous contest. It disturbed him 
keenly to find George Mason opposing the Constitution 
— the dear friend from whom he had always accepted 
counsel hitherto in public affairs — and Richard Henry 
Lee and Patrick Henry, too, in their passionate attach- 
ment to what they deemed the just sovereignty of Vir- 
ginia. He could turn away with all his old self-pos- 
session, nevertheless, to discuss questions of culture and 
tillage, in the midst of the struggle, with Arthur Young 
over sea, and to write very gallant compliments to the 
Marquis de Chastellux on his marriage. " So your day 
has at length come," he laughed. " I am glad of it with 
all my heart and soul. It is quite good enough for you. 
Now you are well served for coming to right in favor of 
the American rebels all the way across the Atlantic 
Ocean, by catching that terrible contagion — domestic 
felicity — which, like the small-pox or the plague, a man 
can have only once in his life, because it commonly lasts 
him (at least with us in America — I don't know how 
you manage such matters in France) for his whole life- 
time." 

Ten months of deep but quiet agitation — the forces 
of opinion in close grapple — and the future seemed to 
clear. The Constitution was adopted, only two States 
dissenting. It had been a tense and stubborn fight : in 
such States as Massachusetts and New York, the con- 
certed action of men at the centres of trade against the 
instinctive dread of centralization or change in the re- 
gions that lay back from the rivers and the sea; in States 
like Virginia, where the mass of men waited to be led, 
the leaders who had vision against those who had 



FIRST IN PEACE 261 

only the slow wisdom of caution and presentiment. 
But, though she acted late in the business, and some 
home-keeping spirits among even her greater men held 
back, Virginia did not lose the place of initiative she 
had had in all this weighty business of reform. Some- 
thing in her air or her life had given her in these latter 
years an extraordinary breed of public men — men liber- 
ated from local prejudice, possessed of a vision and an 
efficacy in affairs worthy of the best traditions of states- 
manship among the English race from which they were 
sprung, capable of taking the long view, of seeing the 
permanent lines of leadership upon great questions, and 
shaping ordinary views to meet extraordinary ends. 
Even Henry and Mason could take their discomfiture 
gracefully, loyally, like men bred to free institutions ; 
and Washington had the deep satisfaction to see his 
State come without hesitation to his view and hope. 

The new Constitution made sure of, and a time set by 
Congress for the elections and the organization of a new 
government under it, the country turned as one man 
to Washington to be the first President of the United 
States. " We cannot, sir, do without you," cried Gov- 
ernor Johnson, of Maryland, " and I and thousands more 
can explain to anybody but yourself why we cannot 
do without you." To make any one else President, it 
seemed to men everywhere, would be like crowning a 
subject while the king was by. But Washington held 
back, as he had held back from attending the Constitu- 
tional Convention. lie doubted his civil capacity, called 
himself an old man, said "it would be to forego repose 
and domestic enjoyment for trouble, perhaps for public 
obloquy." " The acceptance," he declared, " would be 
attended with more diffidence and reluctance than I 



262 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

ever experienced before in my life." But he was not 
permitted to decline. Hamilton told him that his at- 
tendance upon the Constitutional Convention must be 
taken to have pledged him in the view of the country to 
take part also in the formation of the government. " In 
a matter so essential to the well-being of society as the 
prosperity of a newly instituted government," said the 
great advocate, " a citizen of so much consequence as 
yourself to its success has no option but to lend his ser- 
vices, if called for. Permit me to say it would be in- 
glorious, in such a situation, not to hazard the glory, 
however great, which he might have previously ac- 
quired." 

Washington of course yielded, like the simple-minded 
gentleman and soldier he was, when it was made thus a 
matter of duty. When the votes of the electors were 
opened in the new Congress, and it was found that they 
were one and all for him, he no longer doubted. Tie 
did not know how to decline such a call, and turned 
with all his old courage to the new task. 




THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE 

UNITED STATES 



CHAPTER X 

The members of the new Congress were so laggard 
in coming together that it was the 6th of April, 1789, 
before both Houses could count a quorum, though the 
4th of March had been appointed the day for their 
convening. Their first business was the opening and 
counting of the electoral votes ; and on the 7th Charles 
Thomson, the faithful and sedulous gentleman who had 
been clerk of every congress since that first one in the 
old colonial days fifteen years ago, got away on his 
long ride to Mount Yernon to notify Washington of his 
election. Affairs waited upon the issue of his errand. 
"Washington had for long known what was coming, and 
was ready and resolute, as of old. There had been no 
formal nominations for the presidency, and the votes 
of the electors had lain under seal till the new Congress 
met and found a quorum ; but it was an open secret 
who had been chosen President, and Washington had 
made up his mind what to do. Mr. Thomson reached 
Mount Yernon on the 14th, and found Washington 
ready to obey his summons at once. He waited only 
for a hasty ride to Fredericksburg to bid his aged 
mother farewell. She was not tender in the parting. 
Her last days had come, and she had set herself to bear 
with grim resolution the fatal disease that had long 
been upon her. She had never been tender, and these 



266 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

latter days had added their touch of hardness. But it 
was a tonic to her son to take her farewell, none the 
less ; to hear her once more bid him God-speed, and 
once more command him, as she did, to his duty. On 
the morning of the 16th he took the northern road 
again, as so often before, and pressed forward on the 
way for New York. 

The setting out was made with a very heavy heart ; 
for duty had never seemed to him so unattractive as it 
seemed now, and his diffidence had never been so dis- 
tressing. " For myself the delay may be compared to 
a reprieve," he had written to Knox, when he learned 
how slow Congress was in coming together, " for in 
confidence I tell you that my movements to the chair 
of government will be accompanied by feelings not 
unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of 
execution." When the day for his departure came, his 
diary spoke the same heaviness of heart. "About ten 
o'clock," he wrote, " I bade adieu to Mount Vernon, to 
private life, and to domestic felicity ; and, with a mind 
oppressed with more anxious and painful sensations 
than I have words to express, set out for New York." 
He did not doubt that he was doing right ; he doubted 
his capacity in civil affairs, and loved the sweet retire- 
ment and the free life he was leaving behind him. 
Grief and foreboding did not in the least relax his 
proud energy and promptness in action. He was not 
a whit the less resolute to attempt this new role, and 
stretch his powers to the uttermost to play it in master- 
ful fashion. He was only wistful and full of a sort 
of manly sadness ; lacking not resolution, but only 
alacrity. 

He had hoped to the last that he would be suffered 




THOMSON, THE CLERK OF CONGRESS, ANNOUNCING TO WASHINGTON, 
AT MOUNT VERNON, HIS ELECTION TO THE PRESIDENCY 



THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 267 

to spend the rest of his days at Mount Yernon ; he 
knew the place must lack efficient keeping, and fall 
once more out of repair under hired overseers ; he feared 
his strength would be spent and his last years come ere 
he could return to look to it and enjoy it himself again. 
He had but just now been obliged to borrow a round 
sum of money to meet pressing obligations ; and the 
expenses of this very journey had made it necessary to 
add a full hundred pounds to the new debt. If the 
estate brought money so slowly in while he farmed 
it, he must count upon its doing even less while he was 
away ; and yet he had determined to accept no salary 
as President, but only his necessary expenses while in 
the discharge of his official duties, as in the old days 
of the war. It had brought distressing perplexities 
upon him to be thus drawn from his private business 
to serve the nation. Private cares passed off, no doubt, 
and were forgotten as the journey lengthened. But 
the other anxiety, how he should succeed in this large 
business of statesmanship to which he had been called, 
did not pass off ; the incidents of that memorable ride 
only served to heighten it. When he had ridden to 
Cambridge that anxious summer of 1775, he had been 
hailed by cheering crowds upon the wa} r , who admired 
the fine figure he made, and shouted for the cause he 
was destined to lead ; but he knew himself a soldier 
then, was but forty-three, and did not fear to find his 
duty uncongenial. The people had loved him and had 
thronged about him with looks and words it had quick- 
ened his heart to see and hear as he made his way from 
New York to Annapolis to resign his commission but 
six years ago ; but that was upon the morrow of a task 
accomplished, and the plaudits he heard upon the way 



268 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

were but greetings to speed him the more happily 
homeward. Things stood very differently now. Though 
he felt himself grown old, he had come out to meet a 
hope he could not share, and it struck a subtle pain to 
his heart that the people should so trust him — should 
give him so royal a progress as he fared on his way to 
attempt an untried task. 

No king in days of kings' divinity could have looked 
for so heartfelt a welcome to his throne as this modest 
gentleman got to the office he feared to take. Not only 
were there civil fete and military parade at every stage 
of the journey; there was everywhere, besides, a run- 
ning together from all the country roundabout of peo- 
ple who bore themselves not as mere sight-seers, but as 
if they had come out of love for the man they were to 
see pass by. It was not their numbers but their manner 
that struck their hero with a new sense of responsibil- 
ity : their earnest gaze, their unpremeditated cries of 
welcome, their simple joy to see the new government 
put into the hands of a man they perfectly trusted. He 
was to be their guarantee of its good faith, of its respect 
for law and its devotion to liberty ; and they made him 
know their hope and their confidence in the very tone of 
their greeting. There was the manifest touch of love in 
the reception everywhere prepared for him. Refined 
women broke their reserve to greet him in the open 
road ; put their young daughters forward, in their en- 
thusiasm, to strew roses before him in the way ; brought 
tears to his eyes by the very artlessness of their affec- 
tion. When at last the triumphal journey was ended, 
the dispky of every previous stage capped and outdone 
by the fine pageant of his escort of boats from Newark 
and of his reception at the ferry stairs in New York, 



THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 269 

the demonstration seemed almost more than he could 
bear. " The display of boats which attended and joined 
us," he confessed to his diary, "the decorations of the 
ships, the roar of the cannon, and the loud acclamations 
of the people which rent the skies as I walked along 
the streets, filled my mind with sensations as painful 
as they are pleasant"; for his fears foreboded scenes 
the opposite of these, when he should have shown him- 
self unable to fulfil the hopes which were the burden of 
all the present joy. 

It was the 27th of April when he reached New York. 
Notwithstanding his executive fashion of making haste, 
the rising of the country to bid him God-speed had kept 
him four days longer on the way than Mr. Thomson had 
taken to carry the summons to Mount Yern on. Three 
days more elapsed before Congress had completed its 
preparations for his inauguration. On the 30th of April, 
in the presence of a great concourse of people, who first 
broke into wild cheers at sight of him, and then fell si- 
lent again upon the instant to see him so moved, Wash- 
ington stood face to face with the Chancellor of the 
State upon the open balcony of the Federal Hall in Wall 
Street, and took the oath of office. " Do you solemnly 
swear," asked Livingston, "that you will faithfully exe- 
cute the office of President of the United States, and 
will, to the best of your ability, preserve, protect, and 
defend the Constitution of the United States?" "I do 
solemnly swear," replied Washington, "that I will faith- 
fully execute the office of President of the United States, 
and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and 
defend the Constitution of the United States," and then, 
bending to kiss the Bible held before him, bowed his 
head and said " So help me God !" in tones no man could 



270 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

mistake, so deep was their thrill of feeling. " Long live 
George Washington, President of the United States !" 
cried Livingston to the people ; and a great shout went 
up with the booming of the cannon in the narrow 
streets. 

Washington was profoundly moved, and, with all his 
extraordinary mastery of himself, could not hide his 
agitation. It was a company of friends, the Senators 
and Kepresentatives who stood about him within the 
Senate chamber as he read his address, after the taking 
of the oath. Some very old friends were there — men 
who had been with him in the first continental con- 
gress, men who had been his intimate correspondents 
the long years through, men who were now his close 
confidants and sworn supporters. Not many strangers 
could crowd into the narrow hall ; and it was not mere 
love of ceremony, but genuine and heartfelt respect, 
that made the whole company stand while he read. He 
visibly trembled, nevertheless, as he stood in their pres- 
ence, strong and steadfast man though he was, " and 
several times could scarce make out to read " ; shifted 
his manuscript uneasily from hand to hand ; gestured 
with awkward effort ; let his voice fall almost inaudi- 
ble ; was every way unlike himself, except for the sim- 
ple majesty and sincerity that shone in him through it 
all. His manner but gave emphasis, after all, to the 
words he was reading. " The magnitude and difficulty 
of the trust," he declared, " could not but overwhelm 
with despondence one who, inheriting inferior endow- 
ments from nature, and unpractised in the duties of civil 
administration, ought to be peculiarly conscious of his 
own deficiencies" ; and no one there could look at him 
and deem him insincere when he added, "All I dare 



THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 27 1 

aver is that it has been my faithful study to collect my 
duty from a just appreciation of every circumstance by 
which it might be affected. All I dare hope is that, if 
in executing this task I have been too much swayed by 
a grateful remembrance of former instances, or by an 
affectionate sensibility to this transcendent proof of the 
confidence of my fellow-citizens, and have thence too 
little consulted my incapacity as well as disinclination 
for the weighty and untried cares before me, my error 
will be palliated by the motives which misled me, and 
its consequences be judged by my country with some 
share of the partiality with which they originated." 
His hearers knew how near the truth he struck when he 
said, " The smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a 
nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and 
right which Heaven itself has ordained ; and the pres- 
ervation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of 
the republican model of government, are justly consid- 
ered as deeply, perhaps as finally, staked on the experi- 
ment intrusted to the hands of the American people." 
It was, no doubt, " a novelty in the history of society to 
see a great people turn a calm and scrutinizing e}^e upon 
itself," as the people of America had done; "to see it 
carefully examine the extent of the evil " into which dis- 
union and disorder had brought it ; " patiently wait for 
two years until a remedy was discovered " ; and at last 
voluntarily adopt a new order and government " with- 
out having wrung a tear or a drop of blood from man- 
kind." But Washington knew that the praise deserved 
for such mastery and self-possession would be short- 
lived enough if the new government should fail or be 
discredited. It was the overpowering thought that he 
himself would be chiefly responsible for its success or 



272 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

failure that shook his nerves as he stood there at the 
beginning of his task ; and no man of right sensibility 
in that audience failed to like him the better and trust 
him the more implicitly for his emotion. " It was a 
very touching scene," wrote Fisher Ames, of Massa- 
chusetts. " It seemed to me an allegory in which 
virtue was personified as addressing those whom she 
would make her votaries. Her power over the heart 
was never greater, and the illustration of her doctrine 
by her own example was never more perfect." " I 
feel how much I shall stand in need of the countenance 
and aid of every friend to myself, of every friend to 
the Revolution, and of every lover of good govern- 
ment," were Washington's words of appeal to Edward 
Rutledge, of South Carolina ; and he never seemed 
to his friends more attractive or more noble than 
now. 

The inauguration over, the streets fallen quiet again, 
the legislative business of the Houses resumed, Wash- 
ington regained his old self-possession, and turned to 
master his new duties with a calm thoroughness of pur- 
pose which seemed at once to pass into the action of the 
government itself. Perhaps it was true, as he thought, 
that he had been no statesman hitherto; though those 
who had known him would have declared themselves of 
another mind. He had carried the affairs of the Con- 
federation upon his own shoulders, while the war lasted, 
after a fashion the men of that time were not likely to 
forget, so full of energy had he been, so provident and 
capable upon every point of policy. His letters, too, 
since the war ended, had shown his correspondents the 
country over such an appreciation of the present, so 
sure a forecast of the future, so masculine an under- 



THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 273 

standing of what waited to be done and of the means 
at hand to do it, that they, at least, accounted him their 
leader in peace no less than in war. But statesman- 
ship hitherto had been only incidental to his duties as a 
soldier and a citizen. It had been only an accident of 
the Kevoiution that he had had himself, oftentimes, to 
supply the foresight and the capacity in action which 
the halting congress lacked. He had had no experience 
at all in actual civil administration. He did not know 
his own abilities, or realize how rich his experience in 
affairs had, in fact, been. He went about his new tasks 
with diffidence, therefore, but with the full - pulsed 
heartiness, too, of the man who thoroughly trusts him- 
self, for the capacity at any rate of taking pains. 
Statesmanship was now his duty — his whole duty — and 
it was his purpose to understand and execute the office 
of President as he had understood and administered the 
office of General. 

He knew what need there was for caution. This was 
to be, " in the first instance, in a considerable degree, a 
government of accommodation as well as a government 
of laws. Much was to be done by prudence, much by 
conciliation, much by firmness." " I walk," he said, 
" on untrodden ground. There is scarcely an action the 
motive of which may not be subjected to a double in- 
terpretation. There is scarcely any part of my conduct 
which may not hereafter be drawn into precedent." 
But, though he sought a prudent course, he had no mind 
to be timid ; though he asked advice, he meant to be 
his own master. 

Washington had, no doubt, a more precise understand- 
ing of what the new government must be made to 
mean than any other man living, except, perhaps, Ham- 
is 



274 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

ilton and Madison, the men whom he most consulted. 
The Confederation had died in contempt, despised for 
its want of dignity and power. The new government 
must deserve and get pre-eminent standing from the 
first. Its policy must make the States a nation, must 
stir the people out of their pettiness as colonists and 
provincials, and give them a national character and 
spirit. It was not a government only that was to be 
created, but the definite body of opinion also which 
should sustain and perfect it. It must be made w T orth 
believing in, and the best spirits of the country must be 
rallied to its support. It was not the question simply 
of how strong the government should be. Its action 
must, as Washington laid, be mixed of firmness, pru- 
dence, and conciliation, if it would win liking and loyal- 
ty as well as respect. It must cultivate tact as well as 
eschew weakness; must win as well as compel obedience. 
It was of the first consequence to the country, there- 
fore, that the man it had chosen to preside in this deli- 
cate business of establishing a government which should 
be vigorous without being overbearing was a thorough- 
bred gentleman, whose instincts would carry him a 
great way towards the solution of many a nice question 
of conduct. While he waited to be made President he 
called upon every Senator and [Representative then in 
attendance upon Congress, with the purpose to show 
them upon how cordial and natural a basis of personal 
acquaintance he wished, for his part, to see the govern- 
ment conducted ; but, the oath of office once taken, he 
was no longer a simple citizen, as he had been during 
those two days of waiting; the dignity of the govern- 
ment had come into his keeping with the office. Hence- 
forth he would pay no more calls, accept no in vita- 



THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 275 

tions. On a da} 7 " fixed he would receive calls ; and he 
would show himself once a week at Mrs. Washington's 
general receptions. He would invite persons of official 
rank or marked distinction to his table at suitable in- 
tervals. There should be no pretence of seclusion, no 
parade of inaccessibility. The President should be a 
republican officer, the servant of the people. But he 
would not be common. It should be known that 
his office and authority were the first in the land. 
Every proper outward form of dignity, ceremony, and 
self-respect should be observed that might tell whole- 
somely upon the imagination of the people ; that might 
be made to serve as a visible sign, which no man could 
miss, that there was here no vestige of the old federal 
authority, at which it had been the fashion to laugh, 
but a real government, and that the greatest in the land. 
It was not that the President was not to be seen by 
anybody who had the curiosity to wish to see him. 
Many a fine afternoon he was to be seen walking, an 
unmistakable figure, upon the Battery, whither all per- 
sons of fashion in the town resorted for their daily 
promenade, his secretaries walking behind him, but 
otherwise unattended. Better still, he could be seen 
almost any day on horseback, riding in his noble way 
through the streets. People drew always aside to give 
him passage wherever he went, whether he walked or 
rode ; no doubt there was something in his air and bear- 
ing which seemed to expect them to do so ; but their 
respect had the alacrity of affection, and he would 
have borne himself with a like proud figure in his own 
Virginia. Some thought him stiff, but only the churl- 
ish could deem him un republican, so evident was it to 
every candid man that it was not himself but his office 



276 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

he was exalting. His old passion for success was upon 
him, and he meant that this government of which he 
had been made the head should have prestige from the 
first. Count de Moustier, the French Minister to the 
United States, deeming America, no doubt, a protege of 
France, claimed the right to deal directly with the Pres- 
ident in person, as if upon terms of familiar privilege, 
when conducting his diplomatic business; but was 
checked very promptly. It was not likely a man bred 
in the proud school of Virginian country gentlemen 
would miss so obvious a point of etiquette as this. To 
demand intimacy was to intimate superiority, and Wash- 
ington's reply drew from the Count an instant apology. 
That the United States had every reason to hold France 
in loyal affection Washington gladly admitted with all 
stately courtesy ; but affection became servility when it 
lost self-respect, and France must approach the President 
of the United States as every other country did, through 
the properly constituted department. "If there are 
rules of proceeding," he said, quietly, " which have 
originated from the wisdom of statesmen, and are sanc- 
tioned by the common assent of nations, it would not 
be prudent for a young state to dispense with them 
altogether," — particularly a young state (his thought 
added) which foreign states had despised and might 
now try to patronize. These small matters would carry 
an infinite weight of suggestion with them, as he knew, 
and every suggestion that proceeded from the President 
should speak of dignity and independence. 

For the first few months of the new government's 
life these small matters that marked its temper and its 
self-respect were of as much consequence as its laws or 
its efficient organization for the tasks of actual adminis- 



THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 277 

tration. The country evidently looked to Washington 
to set the tone and show what manner of government 
it was to have. Congress, though diligent and purpose- 
ful enough, could linger, meanwhile, the whole summer 
through upon its task of framing the laws necessary for 
the erection and organization of Departments of State, 
for Foreign Affairs, of the Treasury, and of War, and 
the creation of the office of Attorney-General — a simple 
administrative structure to suffice for the present. In 
the interval the treasury board of the Confederation and 
its secretaries of war and foreign affairs were continued 
in service, and the President found time to digest the 
business of the several departments preparatory to their 
reorganization. He sent for all the papers concerning 
their transactions since the treaty of peace of 1783, and 
mastered their contents after his own thorough fashion, 
making copious notes and abstracts as he read. 

He had been scarcely six weeks in office when he was 
stricken with a sharp illness. A malignant tumor in 
his thigh seemed to his physicians for a time to threaten 
mortification. It was three weeks before he could take 
the air again, stretched painfully at length in his coach ; 
even his stalwart strength was slow to rally from the 
draught made upon it by the disease, and its cure with 
the knife. There was deep anxiety for a little among 
those who knew, so likely did it seem that the life of 
the government was staked upon his life. He himself 
had looked very calmly into the doctor's troubled face, 
and had bidden him tell him the worst with that placid 
firmness that always came to him in moments of dan- 
ger. " I am not afraid to die," he said. " Whether to- 
night or twenty years hence makes no difference. I 
know that I am in the hands of a good Providence." A 



278 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

chain had been stretched across the street in front of 
the house where he lay, to check the noisy traffic that 
might have disturbed him more deeply in his fever. 
But the government had not stood still the while. He 
had steadily attended to important matters as he could. 
'Twas scarcely necessary he should be out of bed and 
abroad again to make all who handled affairs feel his 
mastery ; and by the time the summer was ended that 
mastery was founded upon knowledge. He understood 
the affairs of the new government, as of the old, better 
than any other man ; knew the tasks that waited to be 
attempted, the questions that waited to be answered, 
the difficulties that awaited solution, and the means at 
hand for solving them, with a grasp and thoroughness 
such as made it impossible henceforth that any man 
who might be called to serve with him in executive 
business, of whatever capacity in affairs, should be more 
than his counsellor. He had made himself once for all 
head and master of the government. 

By the end of September (1789) Congress had com- 
pleted its work of organization and Washington had 
drawn his permanent advisers about him. The federal 
courts, too, had been erected and given definitive juris- 
diction. The new government had taken distinct shape, 
and was ready to digest its business in detail. Wash- 
ington chose Alexander Hamilton to be Secretary of the 
Treasury, Henry Knox to be Secretary of War, Thomas 
Jefferson Secretar}^ of State, and Edmund Randolph 
Attorney - General — young men all, except Jefferson, 
and he was but forty-six. 

The fate of the government was certain to turn, first 
of all, upon questions of finance. It was hopeless pov- 
erty that had brought the Confederation into deep dis- 



THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 279 

grace ; the new government had inherited from it noth- 
ing but a great debt ; and the first test of character to 
which the new plan in affairs would be put, whether at 
home or abroad, was the test of its ability to sustain 
its financial credit with businesslike thoroughness and 
statesmanlike wisdom. Alexander Hamilton was only 
thirty-two years old. He had been a spirited and capa- 
ble soldier and an astute and eloquent advocate ; but 
he had not had a day's experience in the administration 
of a great governmental department, and had never 
handled — so far as men knew, had never studied — ques- 
tions of public finance. Washington chose him, never- 
theless, without hesitation, for what must certainly turn 
out to be the most critical post in his administration. 
No man saw more clearly than Washington did how 
large a capacity for statesmanship Hamilton had shown 
in his masterly papers in advocacy of the Constitution. 
He had known Hamilton, moreover, through all the 
quick years that had brought him from precocious 
youth to wise maturity ; had read his letters and felt 
the singular power that moved in them ; and was ready 
to trust him with whatever task he would consent to 
assume. 

Henry Knox, that gallant officer of the Eevolution, 
had been already four years Secretary of War for the 
Confederation. In appointing him to the same office 
under the new Constitution, Washington was but re- 
taining a man whom he loved and to whom he had for 
long been accustomed to look for friendship and coun- 
sel. He chose Thomas Jefferson to handle the delicate 
questions of foreign affairs which must press upon the 
young state because, John Adams being Vice-President, 
there was no other man of equal gifts available who had 



280 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

had so large an experience in the field of diplomacy. 
Again and again Jefferson had been chosen for foreign 
missions under the Confederation ; he was American 
Minister to France when Washington's summons called 
him to the Secretaryship of State ; and he came of that 
race of Virginian statesmen from whom Washington 
might reasonably count upon receiving a support 
touched with personal loyalty. Richard Henry Lee, 
Patrick Henry, and George Mason were home-keeping 
spirits, and doubted of the success of the new govern- 
ment ; but Jefferson, though he had looked upon its 
making from across the sea, approved, and was ready 
to lend his aid to its successful establishment. In ap- 
pointing Edmund Randolph to be Attorney - General, 
Washington was but choosing a brilliant young man 
whom he loved out of a great family of lawyers who 
had held a sort of primacy at the bar in Virginia ever 
since he could remember — almost ever since she had 
been called the Old Dominion. Knox was thirty-nine, 
Edmund Randolph thirty-six ; but if Washington chose 
voung men to be his comrades and guides in counsel, it 
was but another capital proof of his own mastery in af- 
fairs. Himself a natural leader, he recognized the like 
gift and capacity in others, even when fortune had not 
yet disclosed or brought them to the test. 

It was hard, in filling even the greater offices, to find 
men of eminence who were willing to leave the service 
of their States or the security and ease of private life to 
try the untrodden paths of federal government. The 
States were old and secure — so men thought — the fed- 
eral government was new and an experiment. The 
stronger sort of men, particularly amongst those bred 
to the law, showed, many of them, a great reluctance 



THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 281 

to identify themselves with new institutions set up but 
live or six months ago ; and Washington, though he 
meant to make every liberal allowance for differences of 
opinion, would invite no man to stand with him in the 
new service who did not thoroughly believe in it. He 
was careful to seek out six of the best lawyers to be had 
in the country when he made up the Supreme Court, 
and to choose them from as many States — John Jay, of 
New York, to be chief justice ; John Kutledge, of South 
Carolina ; William Cushing, of Massachusetts ; John 
Blair, of Virginia ; James Wilson, of Pennsylvania, and 
R. H. Harrison, of Maryland — for he knew that the 
government must draw its strength from the men who 
administered it, and that the common run. of people 
must learn to respect it in the persons of its officers. 
But he was equally careful to find out in advance of 
every appointment what the man whom he wished to 
ask thought of the new government and wished its 
future to be. Many to whom he offered appointment 
declined ; minor offices seemed almost to go a-begging 
amongst men of assured position such as it was his ob- 
ject to secure. It needed all the tact and patience lie 
could command to draw about him a body of men such 
as the country must look up to and revere. His letters 
again went abroad by the hundred, as so often before, 
to persuade men to their duty, build a bulwark of right 
opinion round about the government, make his purposes 
clear and his plans effective. He would spare no pains 
to make the government both great and permanent. 

In October, 1789, his principal appointments all made, 
the government in full operation, and affairs standing 
still till Congress should meet again, he went upon a 
four weeks' tour through the eastern States, to put the 



282 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

people in mind there, by his own presence, of the ex- 
istence and dignity of the federal government, and to 
make trial of their feeling towards it. They received 
him with cordial enthusiasm, for he was secure of their 
love and admiration ; and he had once more a royal 
progress from place to place all the way to far New 
Hampshire and back again. He studiously contrived to 
make it everywhere felt, nevertheless, by every turn of 
ceremonial and behavior, that he had come, not as the 
hero of the Revolution, but as the President of the 
United States. At Boston Governor Hancock sought 
by cordial notes and pleas of illness to force Washing- 
ton to waive the courtesy of a first call from him, and 
so give the executive of Massachusetts precedence, if 
only for old friendship's sake. But Washington would 
not be so defeated of his errand ; forced the perturbed 
old patriot to come to him, swathed as he was in 
flannels and borne upon men's shoulders up the stairs, 
received him with grim courtesy, and satisfied the gos- 
sips of the town once and for all that precedence be- 
longed to the federal government — at any rate, so long 
as George Washington was President. Having seen 
him and feted him, the eastern towns had seen and 
done homage to the new authority set over them. 
Washington was satisfied, and returned with a notice- 
able accession of spirits to the serious work of federal 
administration. 

No man stood closer to him in his purpose to 
strengthen and give prestige to the government than 
Hamilton ; and no man was able to discover the means 
with a surer genius. Hamilton knew who the well- 
wishers of the new government were, whence its 
strength was to be drawn, what it must do to approve 



THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 283 

itself great and permanent, with an insight and thor- 
oughness Washington himself could not match : for 
Hamilton knew Washington and the seats of his 
strength in the country as that self-forgetful man him- 
self could not. He knew that it was the commercial 
classes of the country — such men as he had himself 
dwelt amongst at the great port at New York — who 
were bound by self-interest to the new government, 
which promised them a single policy in trade, in the 
stead of policies a half -score; and that the men who 
were standing to its support out of a reasoned prudence, 
out of a high-minded desire to secure good government 
and a place of consideration for their country amongst 
the nations of the world, were individuals merely, to be 
found only in small groups here and there, where a 
special light shone in some minds. He knew that 
Washington was loved most for his national character 
and purpose amongst the observant middle classes of 
substantial people in the richer counties of Pennsyl- 
vania, New Jersey, New York, and New England, 
while his neighbors in the South loved him with an 
individual affection only, and rather as their hero than 
as their leader in affairs. He saw that the surest way 
to get both popular support and international respect 
was to give to the government at once and in the outset 
a place of command in the business and material inter- 
ests of the country. Such a policy every man could 
comprehend, and a great body of energetic and influ- 
ential men would certainly support ; that alone could 
make the government seem real from the first — a veri- 
table power, not an influence and a shadow merely. 

Here was a man, unquestionably, who had a quick 
genius in affairs; and Washington gave him leave and 



284 



GEORGE WASHINGTON 



initiative with such sympathy and comprehension and 
support as only a nature equally bold and equally orig- 
inative could have given. Hamilton's measures jumped 
with Washington's purpose, ran with Washington's per- 
ception of national interests ; and they were with Wash- 
ington's aid put into execution with a promptness and 
decision which must have surprised the friends of the 
new government no less than it chagrined and alarmed 
its enemies. 

Having done its work of organization during its first 
summer session, the Congress came together again, Jan- 
uary 4th, 1790, to attempt the formulation of a policy of 
government, and Hamilton at once laid before it a " plan 
for the settlement of the public debt" which he had 
drawn and Washington had sanctioned. He proposed 
that provision should be made for the payment of the 
foreign debt in full — that of course ; that the domestic 
debt, the despised promises and paper of the Confeder- 
ation, should be funded and paid ; and that the debts 
contracted by the several States in the prosecution of 
the war for independence should be assumed by the 
general government as the debt of the nation. No one 
could doubt that the foreign debt must be paid in full : 
to that Congress agreed heartily and without hesitation. 
But there was much in the rest of the plan to give pru- 
dent men pause. To pay off the paper of the Confed- 
eration would be to give to the speculators, who had 
bought it up in the hope of just such a measure, a gra- 
tuity of many times what they had paid for it. To 
assume the State debts would be taken to mean that 
.the States were bankrupt or delinquent, that the federal 
government was to be their guardian and financial 
providence, and that the capital of the country must 



THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 285 

look only to the government of the nation, not to the 
government of the States, for security and profitable 
employment. This was. nationalizing the government 
with a vengeance, and was a plain bid, besides, to win 
the moneyed class to its support. Members whose con- 
stituencies lay away from the centres of trade looked 
askance at such measures, and deemed them no better 
than handing the government over to the money lenders 
of the towns. But boldness and energy prevailed, as 
they had prevailed in the adoption of the Constitution 
itself, and both measures were carried through the 
Houses — the first at once, the second after a close and 
doubtful struggle — by stratagem and barter. 

Jefferson had been in France when Washington called 
him to assume the headship of foreign affairs at home ; 
had not reached New York on his return voyage until 
December 23d, 1789 ; and did not take his place in Wash- 
ington's council till March 21st, 1790. All of Hamilton's 
great plan had by that time passed Congress, except the 
assumption of the State debts. Upon that question a 
crisis had been reached. It had wrought Congress to 
a dangerous heat of feeling. Members from the South, 
where trade was not much astir and financial interests 
told for less than local pride and sharp jealousy of a too 
great central power, were set hotly against the measure ; 
most of the Northern members were as hotly resolved 
upon its adoption. Mr. Jefferson must have caught 
echoes and rumors of the great debate as he lingered 
at Monticello in order to adjust his private affairs be- 
fore entering upon his duties in the cabinet. The meas- 
ure had been lost at last in the House by the narrow 
margin of two votes. But the minority were in no 
humor to submit. They declined to transact any busi- 



286 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

ness at all till they should be yielded to in this matter. 
There were even ugly threats to be heard that some 
would withdraw from Congress and force a dissolution 
of the Union rather than make concessions upon the 
one side or the other. 

It was to this pass that things had come when Mr. 
Jefferson reached the seat of government ; and his 
arrival gave Hamilton an opportunity to show how 
consummate a politician he could be in support of his 
statesmanship. The Southern members wanted the seat 
of the federal government established within their 
reach, upon the Potomac, where Congress might at least 
be rid of importunate merchants and money lenders 
clamoring at its doors, and of impracticable Quakers 
with their petitions for the abolition of slavery ; and 
were almost as hot at their failure to get their will in 
that matter as the Northern men were to find them- 
selves defeated upon the question of the State debts. 
Mr. Jefferson w T as fresh upon the field, w 7 as strong 
among the Southern members, w 7 as not embroiled or 
committed in the quarrel. Hamilton besought him to 
intervene. The success of the government was at stake, 
he said, and Mr. Jefferson could pluck it out of peril. 
Might it not be that the Southern men would consent 
to vote for the assumption of the State debts if the 
Northern members would vote for a capital on the 
Potomac? The suggestion came as if upon the thought 
of the moment, at a chance meeting on the street, as 
the two men w r alkecl and talked of matters of the day ; 
but it was very eloquently urged. Mr. Jefferson de- 
clared he w T as " really a stranger to the whole subject," 
but would be glad to lend what aid he could. Would 
not Mr. Hamilton dine with him the next day, to meet 



THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 287 

and confer with a few of the Southern members? In 
the genial air of the dinner-table the whole difficulty 
was talked away. Two of the diners agreed to vote 
for the assumption of the State debts if Mr. Hamilton 
could secure a majority for a capital on the Potomac ; 
and Congress presently ratified the bargain. There was 
not a little astonishment at the sudden clearing of the 
skies. The waters did not go clown at once ; hints of 
a scandal and of the shipwreck of a fair name or two 
went about the town and spread to the country. But 
Congress had come out of its angry tangle of factions, 
calm had returned to the government, and Hamilton's 
plan stood finished and complete. He had nationalized 
the government as he wished. 

It was this fact that most struck the eye of Jefferson 
when he had settled to his work and had come to see 
affairs steadily and as a whole at the seat of govern- 
ment. He saw Hamilton supreme in the cabinet and in 
legislation — not because either the President or Con- 
gress was weak, but because Hamilton was a master in 
his new field, and both Congress and the President had 
accepted his leadership. It chagrined Jefferson deeply 
to see that he had himself assisted at Hamilton's tri- 
umph, had himself made it complete, indeed. He could 
not easily brook successful rivalry in leadership; must 
have expected to find himself, not Hamilton, preferred 
in the counsels of a Virginian President ; was beyond 
measure dismayed to see the administration already in 
the hands, as it seemed, of a man just two months turned 
of thirty -three. He began ere long to declare that he 
had been "most ignorantly and innocently made to hold 
the candle" to the sharp work of the Secretary of the 
Treasur} 7 , having been " a stranger to the circum- 



288 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

stances." But it was not the circumstances of which 
lie had been ignorant; it was the effect of what he had 
done upon his own wish to play the chief role in the 
new government. When he came to a calm scrutiny of 
the matter, he did not like the assumption of the State 
debts, and, what was more serious for a man of politi- 
cal ambition, it was bitterly distasteful to the very men 
from whom he must look to draw a following when par- 
ties should form. He felt that he had been tricked ; he 
knew that he had been outrun in the race for leadership. 
What he did not understand or know how to reckon 
with was the place and purpose of Washington in the 
government. Hamilton had been Washington's aide 
and confidant when a lad of twenty, and knew in what 
way those must rule who served under such a chief. He 
knew that Washington must first be convinced and 
won; did not for a moment doubt that the President 
held the reins and was master; was aware that his own 
plans had prospered both in the making and in the 
adoption because the purpose they spoke was the purpose 
Washington most cherished. Washington had adopted 
the fiscal measures as his own ; Hamilton's strength 
consisted in having his confidence and support. Jefferson 
had slowly to discover that leadership in the cabinet was 
to be had, not by winning a majority of the counsellors 
who sat in it, but by winning Washington. That master- 
ful man asked counsel upon every question of conse- 
quence, but took none his own judgment did not ap- 
prove. He had chosen Hamilton because he knew his 
views, Jefferson only because he knew his influence, 
ability, and experience in affairs. When he did test 
Jefferson's views he found them less to his liking than 
he had expected. 



THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 289 

He had taken Jefferson direct from France, where for 
five vears he had been watching a revolution come on 
apace, hurried from stage to stage, not by statesmen 
who were masters in the art and practice of freedom, 
like those who had presided in the counsels of America, 
but by demagogues and philosophers rather; and the 
subtle air of that age of change had crept into the 
man's thought. He had come back a philosophical 
radical rather than a statesman. He had yet to learn, 
in the practical air of America, what plain and steady 
policy must serve him to win hard-headed men to his 
following; and Washington found him a guide who 
needed watching. Foreign affairs, over which it was 
Jefferson's duty to preside, began of a sudden to turn 
upon the politics of France, where Jefferson's thought 
was so much eno-aged. The vear 1789, in which America 
gained self-possession and set up a government soberly 
planned to last, was the year in which France lost self- 
possession and set out upon a wild quest for liberty 
which was to cost her both her traditional polity and 
all the hopes she had of a new one. In that year broke 
the storm of the French revolution. 

It was a dangerous infection that went abroad from 
France in those first days of her ardor, and nowhere 
was it more likely to spread than in America. 

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, 
But to be young was very heaven ! O times 
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways 
Of custom, law, and statute took at once 
The attraction of a country in romance ! 
When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights 
When most intent on making of herself 
A prime Enchantress, to assist the work 
19 



290 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

Which then was going forward in her name ! 
Not favored spots alone, but the whole earth, 
The beauty wore of promise, that which sets 
(As at some moments might not be uufelt 
Among the bowers of paradise itself) 
The budding rose above the rose full blown." 

Was not this spirit that had sprung to such sudden 
might in France the very spirit that had made America 
free, her people sovereign, her government liberal as 
men could dream of ? Was not France now more than 
ever America's friend and close ally against the world ? 
'Twoulcl be niggardly to grudge her aid and love to the 
full in this day of her emulation of America's great ex- 
ample. The Bastile was down, tyranny at an end, 
Lafayette the people's leader. The gallant Frenchman 
himself could think of nothing more appropriate than to 
send the great key of the fallen fortress to Washington. 
But Washington's vision in affairs was not obscured. 
He had not led revolutionary armies without learning 
what revolution meant. " The revolution which has 
been effected in France," he said, " is of so wonderful a 
nature that the mind can hardly realize the fact" — his 
calm tones ringing strangely amidst the enthusiastic 
cries of the time. " I fear, though it has gone trium- 
phantly through the first paroxysm, it is not the last it 
has to encounter before matters are finally settled. The 
revolution is of too great a magnitude to be effected in 
so short a space and with the loss of so little blood." 
He hoped, but did not believe, that it would run its 
course without fatal disorders; and he meant, in any 
case, to keep America from the infection. She was her- 
self but "in a convalescent state," as he said, after her 
own great struggle. She was too observant still, more- 



THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 291 

over, of European politics and opinion, like a province 
rather than like a nation — inclined to take sides as if she 
were still a child of the European family, who had flung 
away from her mother England to cling in pique to an 
ancient foe. Washington's first and almost single ob- 
ject, at every point of policy, was to make of the pro- 
vincial States of the Union a veritable nation, inde- 
pendent, at any rate, and ready to be great when its 
growth should come, and its self-knowledge. " Every 
true friend to this country," he said, at last, "must- see 
and feel that the policy of it is not to embroil ourselves 
with any nation whatever, but to avoid their disputes 
and their politics, and, if they will harass one another, 
to avail ourselves of the neutral conduct we have adopt- 
ed. Twenty years' peace, with such an increase of pop- 
ulation and resources as we have a right to expect, 
added to our remote situation from the jarring powers, 
will in all probability enable us, in a just cause, to bid 
defiance to any power on earth"; and such were his 
thought and purpose from the first. " I want an Amer- 
ican character," he cried, "that the powers of Europe 
may be convinced we act for ourselves, and not for 
others." He had been given charge of a nation in the 
making, and he meant it should form, under his care, an 
independent character. 

It was thus he proved himself no sentimentalist, but 
a statesman. It was stuff of his character, this purpose 
of independence. He would have played a like part of 
self-respect for himself among his neighbors on the Vir- 
ginian plantations ; and he could neither understand nor 
tolerate the sentiment which made men like Jefferson 
eager to fling themselves into European broils. Truly 
this man was the first American, the men about him 



292 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

provincials merely, dependent still for their life and 
thought upon the breath of the Old World, unless, like 
Hamilton, they had been born and had stood aloof, or, 
like Gouverneur Morris, had divined Europe in her own 
capitals with clear, unenamoured eyes. Fortunately 
affairs could be held steadily enough to a course of wise 
neutrality and moderation at first, while France's revolu- 
tion wrought only its work of internal overthrow and 
destruction ; and while things went thus opinion began 
slowly to cool. 'Twas plain to be seen, as the months 
went by, that the work being done in France bore no 
real likeness at all to the revolution in America ; and 
wise men began to see it for what it was, a social dis- 
temper, not a reformation of government — effective 
enough as a purge, no doubt ; inevitable, perhaps ; a 
cure of nature's own devising; but by no means to be 
taken part in by a people not likewise stricken, still 
free to choose. At first Washington and a few men of 
like insight stood almost alone in their cool self-posses- 
sion. Every man of generous spirit deemed it his mere 
duty to extol the French, to join clubs after their man- 
ner, in the name of the rights of man, to speak every- 
where in praise of the revolution. But bv the time it 
became necessary to act — to declare the position and 
policy of the nation's government towards France — a 
sober second thought had come, and Washington's task 
was a little simplified. 

The crisis came with the year 1793. In 1792 France 
took arms against her European neighbors, let her mobs 
sack the King's palace, declared herself a republic, and 
put her monarch on trial for his life. The opening days 
of 1793 saw Louis dead upon the scaffold; England, 
Holland, Spain, and the Empire joined with the alliance 



THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 293 

against the fevered nation ; and war as it were spread 
suddenly to all the world. Would not America succor 
her old ally ? Was there no compulsion in the name of 
liberty ? Would she stand selfishly off to save herself 
from danger? There was much in such a posture of 
affairs to give pause even to imperative men like Wash- 
ington. Those who favored France seemed the spokes- 
men of the country. The thoughtful men, to whom 
the real character of the great revolution over sea was 
beginning to be made plain, were silent. It would have 
required a veritable art of divination to distinguish the 
real sentiment of the country, upon which, after all, the 
general government must depend. " It is on great oc- 
casions only, and after time has been given for cool 
and deliberate reflection," Washington held, "that the 
real voice of the people can be known"; but a great 
risk must be run in waiting to know it. 

The measures already adopted by the government, 
though well enough calculated to render it strong, had 
not been equally well planned to make it popular. The 
power to tax, so jealously withheld but the other day 
from the Confederation, the new Congress had be^-un 
promptly and confidently to exercise upon a great scale, 
not only laying duties upon imports, the natural re- 
source of the general government, but also imposing 
taxes upon distilled spirits, and so entering the fiscal 
field of the States. Not only had the war debts of the 
States been assumed, but a national bank had been set 
up (1.791), as if still further to make the general govern- 
ment sure of a complete mastery in the field of finance. 
Jefferson and Randolph had fought the measure in the 
cabinet, as many a moderate man had fought it in Con- 
gress, and Washington had withheld his signature from 



294 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

it till he should hear what they had to urge. But he 
had sent their arguments to Hamilton for criticism, and 
had accepted his answer in favor of the bank. Jeffer- 
son and Randolph had challenged the measure on the 
ground that it was without warrant in the Constitu- 
tion, which nowhere gave Congress the right to create 
corporations, fiscal or other. Hamilton replied that, 
besides the powers explicitly enumerated, the Constitu- 
tion gave to Congress the power to pass any measure 
" necessary and proper " for executing those set forth ; 
that Congress was itself left to determine what might 
thus seem necessary ; and that if it deemed the erection 
of a bank a proper means of executing the undoubted 
financial powers of the government, the constitutional 
question was answered. By accepting such a view 
Washington sanctioned the whole doctrine of "implied 
powers," which Jefferson deemed the very annulment 
of a written and explicit constitution. No bounds, 
Jefferson believed, could be set to the aggressive sweep 
of congressional pretension if the two Houses were to 
be given leave to do whatever they thought expedient 
in exercising their in any case great and commanding 
powers. No man could doubt, in the face of such meas- 
ures, what the spirit and purpose of Hamilton were, or 
of the President whom Hamilton so strangely domi- 
nated. 

Strong measures bred strong opposition. When the 
first Congress came together there seemed to be no par- 
ties in the country. All men seemed agreed upon a fair 
and spirited trial of the new Constitution. But an oppo- 
sition had begun to gather form before its two years' 
term was out ; and in the second Congress party lines 
began to grow definite — not for and against the Consti- 



THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 295 

tution, bat for and against an extravagant use of con- 
stitutional powers. There was still a majority for the 
principal measures of the administration ; but the minor- 
ity had clearly begun to gather force both in the votes 
and in the debates. The reaction was unmistakable. 
Even Madison, Washington's stanch friend and inti- 
mate counsellor, who had at first been his spokesman in 
the House, began to draw back — first doubted and 
then opposed the policy of the Treasury. He had led 
the opposition to the bank, and grew more and more 
uneasy to note the course affairs were taking. It looked 
as if the administration were determined of set purpose 
to increase the expenses of the government, in order 
that they might add to the loans, which were so accept- 
able to influential men of wealth, and double the taxes 
which made the power of the government so real in the 
eyes of the people. Steps were urged to create a navy ; 
to develop an army with permanent organization and 
equipment ; and the President insisted upon vigorous 
action at the frontiers against the western Indians. 
This was part of his cherished policy. It was his way 
of fulfilling the vision that had long ago come to him, 
of a nation spreading itself down the western slopes of 
the mountains and over all the broad reaches of fertile 
land that looked towards the Mississippi ; but to many a 
member of Congress from the quiet settlements in the 
east it looked like nothing better than a waste of men 
and of treasure. The President seemed even a little too 
imperious in the business: would sometimes come into 
the Senate in no temper to brook delay in the consider- 
ation and adoption of what he proposed in such matters. 
When things went wrong through the fault of the com- 
manders he had sent to the frontier, he stormed in a 



296 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

sudden fury, as sometimes in the old days of the war, 
scorning soldiers who must needs blunder and fail. The 
compulsion of his will grew often a little irksome to 
the minority in Congress; and the opposition slowly 
pulled itself together as the months went by to concert 
a definite policy of action. 

Washington saw as plainly as any man what was 
taking place. He was sensitive to the movements of 
opinion ; wished above all things to have the govern- 
ment supported by the people's approval ; was never 
weary of writing to those who were in a position to know, 
to ask them what they and their neighbors soberly 
thought about the questions and policies under debate ; 
was never so impatient as to run recklessly ahead of 
manifest public opinion. He knew how many men had 
been repelled by the measures he had supported Hamil- 
ton in proposing ; knew that a reaction had set in ; that 
even to seem to repulse France and to refuse her aid or 
sympathy would surely strengthen it. The men who 
were opposed to his financial policy were also the men 
who most loved France, now she was mad with revolu- 
tion. They were the men who dreaded a strong gov- 
ernment as a direct menace to the rights alike of in- 
dividuals and of the separate States ; the men who held 
a very imperative philosophy of separation and of revolt 
against any too great authority. If he showed himself 
cold towards France, he would certainly strengthen 
them in their charge that the new government craved 
power and was indifferent to the guarantees of freedom. 

But Washington's spirit was of the majestic sort that 
keeps a great and hopeful confidence that the right view 
will prevail; that the "standard to which the wise and 
honest will repair " is also the standard to which the 



THE FIRST PRESLDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 297 

whole people will rally at last, if it be but held long and 
steadily enough on high to be seen of all. When the 
moment for action came he acted promptly, unhesitat- 
ingly, as if in indifference to opinion. The outbreak of 
war between France and England made it necessary he 
should let the country know what he meant to do. 
" War having actually commenced between France and 
Great Britain," he wrote to Jefferson in April, 1793, " it 
behooves the government of this country to use every 
means in its power to prevent the citizens thereof from 
embroiling us with either of those powers, by endeavor- 
ing to maintain a strict neutrality. I therefore require 
that you will give the subject mature consideration, 
that such measures as shall be deemed most likely to 
effect this desirable purpose may be adopted without 
delay. . . . Such other measures as may be necessary 
for us to pursue against events which it may not be in 
our power to avoid or control, you will also think of, and 
lay them before me at my arrival in Philadelphia ; for 
which place I shall set out to-morrow." He was at 
Mount Yernon when he despatched these instructions ; 
but it did not take him long to reach the seat of gov- 
ernment, to consult his cabinet, and to issue a proclama- 
tion of neutrality whose terms no man could mistake. 
It contained explicit threat of exemplary action against 
any who should presume to disregard it. 

That very month (April, 1793) Edrnond Charles Genet, 
a youth still in his twenties whom the new republic over 
sea had commissioned Minister to the United States, 
landed at Charleston. It pleased him to take posses- 
sion of the country, as if it were of course an appanage 
of France. He was hardly ashore before he had begun 
to arrange for the fitting out of privateers, to issue let- 



298 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

ters of marque to American citizens, and to authorize 
French consuls at American ports to act as judges of ad- 
miralty in the condemnation of prizes. As he journeyed 
northward to Philadelphia he was joyfully confirmed in 
his views and purposes by his reception at the hands of 
the people. lie was everywhere dined and toasted and 
feted, as if he had been a favorite prince returned to his 
subjects. His speeches by the way rang in a tone of au- 
thority and patronage. He reached Philadelphia fairly 
mad with the sense of power, and had no conception of 
his real situation till he stood face to face with the Pres- 
ident. Of that grim countenance and cold greeting 
there could be but one interpretation; and the fellow 
winced to feel that at last he had come to a grapple 
with the country's government. It was, no doubt, in 
the eyes of the sobering man, a strange and startling 
thing that then took place. The country itself had not 
fully known Washington till then— or its own dignity 
either. It had deemed the proclamation of neutrality a 
party measure, into which the President had been led 
by the enemies of France, the partisans of England. 
Bat the summer undeceived everybody, even Genet. 
Not content with the lawless mischief he had set afoot 
on the coasts by the commissioning of privateersmen, 
that mad youth had hastened to send agents into 
the south and west to enlist men for armed expedi- 
tions against the Floridas and against New Orleans, on 
the coveted Mississippi; but his work was everywhere 
steadily undone. Washington acted slowly, deliberately 
even, with that majesty of self-control, that awful cour- 
tesy and stillness in wrath, that had ever made him a 
master to be feared in moments of sharp trial. One by 
one the unlawful prizes were seized ; justice was done 



THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 299 

upon their captors ; the false admiralty courts were shut 
up. The army of the United States was made ready 
to check the risings in the south and west, should there 
be need ; the complaints of the British Minister were 
silenced by deeds as well as by words ; the clamor of 
those who had welcomed the Frenchman so like pro- 
vincials was ignored, though for a season it seemed the 
voice of the country itself ; and the humiliating work, 
which ought never to have been necessary, was at last 
made effective and complete. 

Towards the close of June, Washington ventured to 
go for a little while to Mount Yernon for rest. At once 
there was trouble. A privateer was found taking arms 
and stores aboard in the very river at Philadelphia; 
Jefferson allowed her to drop down to Chester, believ- 
ing Genet instead of the agents of the government ; and 
she was upon the point of getting to sea before Wash- 
ington could reach the seat of government. Jefferson 
was not in town when the President arrived. " What 
is to be done in the case of the Little Sarah, now at 
Chester?" came Washington's hot questions after him. 
" Is the Minister of the French Kepublic to set the acts 
of this government at defiance with impunity? And 
then threaten the executive with an appeal to the peo- 
ple ? What must the world think of such conduct, and 
of the United States in submitting to it? Circumstances 
press for decision ; and as you have had time to con- 
sider them, I wish to know your opinion upon them, 
even before to-morrow, for the vessel may then be 
gone." It was indeed too late to stop her : a gross vio- 
lation of neutrality had been permitted under the very 
eyes of the Secretary of State. Washington stayed 
henceforth in Philadelphia, in personal control of affairs. 



300 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

It was an appeal to the people that finally delivered 
Genet into his hands. Washington revoked the exe- 
quatur of one Duplaine, French consul at Boston, for 
continuing to ignore the laws of neutrality; Genet de- 
clared he would appeal from the President to the sover- 
eign State of Massachusetts ; rumors of the silly threat 
got abroad, and Genet demanded of the President that 
he deny them. Washington answered with a chilling 
rebuke; the correspondence was given to the public 
prints; and at last the country saw the French Minister 
for what he was. A demand for his recall had been re- 
solved upon in the cabinet in August ; by February, 
1794, the slow processes of diplomatic action were com- 
plete, and a successor had arrived. Genet did not vent- 
ure to return to his distracted country ; but he was as 
promptly and as readily forgotten in America. Some 
might find it possible to love France still ; but no one 
could any longer stomach Genet. 

Washington had divined French affairs much too 
clearly to be for a moment tempted to think with 
anything but contempt of the French party who had 
truckled to Genet. " The affairs of France," he said to 
Lee, in the midst of Genet's heyday, " seem to me to be 
in the highest paroxysm of disorder; not so much from 
the presence of foreign enemies, but because those in 
whose hands the government is intrusted are ready to 
tear each other to pieces, and will more than probably 
prove the worst foes the country has." It was his clear 
perception what the danger would be should America 
be drawn into the gathering European wars that had 
led him to accept a second term as President. It had 
been his wish to remain only four years in the arduous 
office : but he had no thought to leave a task unfinished ,* 



THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 301 

knew that he was in the very midst of the critical busi- 
ness of holding the country to the course which should 
make it a self-respecting nation; and consented to 
submit himself once more to the vote of the electors. 
Parties were organizing, but there was no opposition to 
Washington. He received again a unanimous vote ; and 
John Adams was again chosen Yice- President. The 
second inauguration (March, 1793) seemed but a rou- 
tine confirmation of the first. But the elections to 
Congress showed a change setting in. In the Senate 
the avowed supporters of the administration had still a 
narrow majority ; but in the House they fell ten votes 
short of control ; and Washington had to put his policy 
of neutrality into execution against the mad Genet with 
nothing but doubts how he should be supported. The 
insane folly of Genet saved the President serious embar- 
rassment, after all ; made the evidence that Washington 
was right too plain to be missed by anybody ; and gave 
the country at last vision enough to see what was in 
fact the course of affairs abroad, within and without 
unhappy France. Before that trying year 1793 was 
out, an attack upon Hamilton in the House, though led 
by Madison, had failed ; Jefferson had left the cabinet ; 
and the hands of those who definitely and heartily sup- 
ported the President were not a little strengthened. 
There was sharp bitterness between parties — a bitter- 
ness sharper as yet, indeed, than their differences of 
view ; but the " federalists," who stood to the support 
of Washington and Hamilton, were able, none the less, 
to carry their more indispensable measures — even an 
act of neutrality which made the President's policy the 
explicit law of the land. The sober second thought of 
the country was slowly coming about to their aid. 



302 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

The air might have cleared altogether had the right 
method of dealing with France been the only question 
that pressed ; but the ill fortune of the time forced the 
President to seem not only the recreant friend of 
France, but also the too complacent partisan of Eng- 
land. Great Britain seemed as mischievously bent upon 
forcing the United States to war as Genet himself had 
been. She would not withdraw her garrisons from the 
border posts; it was believed that she was inciting the 
Indians to their savage inroads upon the border, as the 
French had done in the old days ; she set herself to de- 
stroy neutral trade by seizing all vessels that carried the 
products of the French islands or were laden with pro- 
visions for their ports ; she would admit American ves- 
sels to her own West Indian harbors only upon suffer- 
ance, and within the limits of a most jealous restriction. 
It gave a touch of added bitterness to the country's 
feeling against her that she should thus levy as it were 
covert war upon the Union while affecting to be at 
peace with it, as if she counted on its weakness, es- 
pecially on the seas ; and Congress would have taken 
measures of retaliation, which must certainly have led 
to open hostilities, had not Washington intervened, de- 
spatching John Jay, the trusted Chief Justice, across sea 
as minister extraordinary, to negotiate terms of accom- 
modation; and so giving pause to the trouble. 

While the country waited upon the negotiation, it 
witnessed a wholesome object-lesson in the power of 
its new government. In March, 1791, Congress had 
passed an act laying taxes on distilled spirits : 'twas 
part of Hamilton's plan to show that the federal gov- 
ernment could and would use its great authority. The 
act bore nowhere so hard upon the people as in the vast 



THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 303 

far counties of Pennsylvania and Virginia, beyond the 
mountains — and there the very allegiance of the people 
had been but the other day doubtful, as Washington 
very well knew. How w T ere they to get their corn to 
market over the long roads if they were not to be per- 
mitted to reduce its bulk and increase its value by turn- 
ing it into whiskey ? The tax seemed to them intoler- 
able, and the remedy plain. They would not pay it. 
They had not been punctilious to obey the laws of the 
States ; they would not begin obedience now by sub- 
mitting to the worst laws of the United States. At first 
they only amused themselves by tarring and feathering 
an exciseman here and there ; but resistance could not 
stop with that in the face of a government bent upon 
having its own way. Opposition organized itself and 
spread, till the writs of federal courts had been defied 
by violent mobs and the western counties of Pennsyl- 
vania were fairly quick with incipient insurrection. 

For two years Washington watched the slow gather- 
ing of the storm, warning those who resisted, keeping 
Congress abreast of him in preparation for action when 
the right time should come, letting all the country know 
what was afoot and prepare its mind for what was to 
come. It must have won him to a stern humor to learn 
that seven thousand armed men had gathered in mass- 
meeting on Braddock's field to defy him. At last he 
summoned an army of militia out of the States, sent it 
straight to the lawless counties, going with it himself 
till he learned there would be no serious resistance — 
and taught the country what was back of federal law. 
Hamilton had had his way, the country its lesson. 
" The servile copyist of Mr. Pitt thought he must have 
his alarms, his insurrections and plots against the Con- 



304 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

stitution," sneered Jefferson. " It aroused the favorite 
purposes of strengthening government and increasing 
the public debt ; and therefore an insurrection was 
announced and proclaimed and armed against and 
marched against, but could never be found. And all 
this under the sanction of a name which has done too 
much good not to be sufficient to cover harm also. 11 
" The powers of the executive of this country are more 
definite and better understood, perhaps, than those of any 
other country," Washington had said, " and my aim has 
been, and will continue to be, neither to stretch nor to 
relax from them in any instance whatever, unless com- 
pelled to it by imperious circumstances," and that was 
what he meant the country to know, whether the law's 
purpose was good or bad. 

The next year the people knew what Mr. Jay had 
done. He reached New York May 28th, 1796 ; and the 
treaty he brought with him was laid before the Senate 
on the 8th of June. On the 2d of July the country 
knew what he had agreed to and the Senate had rati- 
fied. There was an instant outburst of wrath. It swept 
from one end of the country to the other. The treaty 
yielded so much, gained so little, that to accept it 
seemed a veritable humiliation. The northwestern posts 
were, indeed, to be given up at last; the boundaries 
between English and American territory were to be 
determined by commissioners ; unrestricted commerce 
with England herself, and a free direct trade with her 
East Indian possessions, were conceded ; but not a word 
was said about the impressment of American seamen ; 
American claims for damages for unjust seizures in the 
West Indies were referred to a commission, along with 
American debts to Englishmen ; the coveted trade with 




DEATH OF WASHINGTON 



THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 305 

the West Indian islands was secured only to vessels of 
seventy tons and under, and at the cost of renouncing 
the right to export sugar, molasses, coffee, cocoa, or 
cotton to Europe. Washington agreed with the Senate 
that ratifications of the treaty ought not to be ex- 
changed without a modification of the clauses respect- 
ing the West Indian trade, and October had come 
before new and better terms could be agreed upon ; 
but he had no doubt that the treaty as a whole ought 
to be accepted. The opposition party in Congress had 
refused to vote money for an efficient navy, and so had 
made it impossible to check British aggressions : they 
must now accept this unpalatable treaty as better at 
any rate than war. 

It was hard to stand steady in the storm. The coun- 
try took fire as it- had done at the passage of the Stamp 
Act. Harder things had never been said of king" and 
parliament than were now said of Washington and his 
advisers. Many stout champions stood to his defence — 
none stouter or more formidable than Hamilton, no 
longer a member of the cabinet, for imperative private 
interests had withdrawn him these six months and 
more, but none the less redoubtable in the field of con- 
troversy. For long, nevertheless, the battle went heav- 
ily against the treaty. Even Washington, for once, 
stood a little while perplexed, not doubting his own pur- 
pose, indeed, but very anxious what the outcome should 
be. Protests against his signing the treaty poured in 
upon him from every quarter of the country : many of 
them earnest almost to the point of entreaty, some hot 
with angry comment. His reply, when he vouchsafed 
any, was always that his very gratitude for the appro- 
bation of the country in the past fixed him but the more 
20 



306 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

firmly in his resolution to deserve it now by obeying his 
own conscience. " It is very desirable," he wrote to 
Hamilton, " to ascertain, if possible, after the paroxysm 
of the fever is a little abated, what the real temper of 
the people is concerning it ; for at present the cry 
against the Treaty is like that against a mad dog;" but 
he showed himself very calm to the general eye, mak- 
ing his uneasiness known only to his intimates. The 
cruel abuse heaped upon him cut him to the quick. 
" Such exaggerated and indecent terms," he cried, " could 
scarcely be applied to a Nero, a notorious defaulter, 
or even to a common pickpocket." But the men who 
sneered and stormed, talked of usurpation and impeach- 
ment, called him base, incompetent, traitorous even, 
were permitted to see not so much as the quiver of an 
e\ 7 elid as they watched him go steadily from step to 
step in the course he had chosen. 

At last the storm cleared ; the bitter months were 
over ; men at the ports saw at length how much more 
freely trade ran under the terms of the treaty, and re- 
membered that, while they had been abusing Jay and 
maligning the President, Thomas Pinckney had. ob- 
tained a treaty from Spain which settled the Florida 
boundary, opened the Mississippi without restriction, 
secured a place of deposit at New Orleans, and made 
commerce with the Spaniards as free as commerce with 
the French. The whole country felt a new impulse of 
prosperity. The " paroxysm of the fever " was over, 
and shame came upon the men who had so vilely abused 
the great President and had made him wish, in his bit- 
terness, that he were in his grave rather than in the 
Presidency ; who had even said that he had played false 
in the Revolution, and had squandered public moneys ; 



THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 307 

who had gone beyond threats of impeachment and dared 
to hint at assassination! They saw the end of his term 
approach, and would have recalled their insults. But 
they had alienated his great spirit forever. 

When he had seen parties forming in his cabinet in 
the quiet days of his first term as President, he had 
sought to placate differences ; had tried to bring Ham- 
ilton and Jefferson to a cordial understanding which 
should be purged of partisan bias, as he meant his own 
judgments to be; had deemed parties unnecessary and 
loyalty to the new Constitution the only standard of 
preferment to office. But he had come to another mind 
in the hard years that followed. " I shall not, whilst I 
have the honor to administer the government, bring a 
man into any office of consequence knowingly," he de- 
clared in the closing days of 1795, " whose political 
tenets are adverse to the tenets which the general gov- 
ernment are pursuing ; for this, in my opinion, would be 
a sort of political suicide ;" and he left the Presidency 
ready to call himself very flatly a " Federalist" — of the 
party that stood for the Constitution and abated noth- 
ing of its powers. " You could as soon scrub a blacka- 
more white," he cried, "as to change the principle of a 
profest Democrat" — "he will leave nothing unattempt- 
ed to overturn the Government of this Country." 

Affairs fell very quiet again as the last year of his 
Presidency drew towards its close. Brisk trade under 
the new treaties heartened the country more and more ; 
the turbulent democratic clubs that had so noisily af- 
fected French principles and French modes of agitation 
were sobered and discredited, now the Keign of Terror 
had come and wrought its bloody work in France ; the 
country turned once more to Washington with its old 



308 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

confidence and affection, and would have had him take 
the Presidency a third time, to keep the government 
steady in its new ways. 

Bat he would not have the hard office again. On the 
19th of September, 1796, he published to the people a 
farewell address, quick with the solemn eloquence men 
had come to expect from him. He wrote to Hamil- 
ton and to Madison for advice as to what he should 
say, as in the old days of his diffident beginnings in the 
great office — though Hamilton was the arch-Federalist 
and Madison was turning Democrat — took their phrases 
for his thought where they seemed better than his own ; 
put the address forth as his mature and last counsel to 
the little nation he loved. " It w T as designed," he said, 
" in a more especial manner for the yeomanry of the 
country," and spoke the advice he hoped they might 
take to heart. The circumstances which had given his 
services a temporary value, he told them, were passed ; 
they had now a unified and national government, which 
might serve them for great ends. He exhorted them 
to preserve it intact, and not to degrade it in the using ; 
to put down party spirit, make religion, education, and 
good faith the guides and safeguards of their govern- 
ment, and keep it national and their own by excluding 
foreign influences and entanglements. 'Twas a noble 
document. No thoughtful man could read it without 
emotion, knowing how it spoke in all its solemn sen- 
tences the great character of the man whose career was 
ended. 

When the day came on which he should resign his 
office to John Adams, the great civilian who was to 
succeed him, there was a scene which left no one in 
doubt— not even Washington himself — what the people 



THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 309 

thought of the leader they had trusted these twenty 
years. A great crowd was assembled to see the simple 
ceremonies of the inauguration, as on that April day in 
New York eight years ago ; but very few in the throng 
watched Adams. All eyes were bent upon that great 
figure in black velvet, with a light sword slung at his 
side. No one stirred till he had left the room, to follow 
and pay his respects to the new President. Then they 
and all the crowd in the streets moved after him, an 
immense company, going as one man, " in total silence," 
his escort all the way. He turned upon the threshold 
of the President's lodgings and looked, as if for the last 
time, upon this multitude of nameless friends. " No 
man ever saw him so moved." The tears rolled un- 
checked down his cheeks; and when at last he went 
within, a great smothered common voice went through 
the stirred throng, as if they sobbed to see their hero 
go from their sight forever. 

It had been noted how cheerful he looked, at thought 
of his release, as he entered the hall of the Kepresenta- 
tives, where Mr. Adams was to take the oath. As soon 
as possible he was at his beloved Mount Vernon once 
more, to pick up such threads as he might of the old 
life again. " I begin my diurnal course with the sun," 
he wrote, in grave playfulness, to a friend ; " if my 
hirelings are not in their places by that time. I send 
them messages of sorrow for their indisposition ; having 
put these wheels in motion, I examine the state of 
things further; the more they are probed the deeper I 
find the wounds which my buildings have sustained by 
an absence and neglect of eight years ; by the time I 
have accomplished these matters breakfast (a little after 
seven o'clock, about the time, I presume, that you are 



310 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

taking leave of Mrs. McIIenry) is ready; this being 
over, I mount my horse and ride round my farms, which 
employs me until it is time to dress for dinner. . . . The 
usual time of sitting at the table, a walk, and tea bring 
me within the dawn of candlelight ; previous to which, 
if not prevented by company, I resolve that as soon as 
the glimmering taper supplies the place of the great 
luminary I will retire to my writing-table and acknowl- 
edge the letters I have received ; when the lights are 
brought I feel tired and disinclined to engage in this 
work, conceiving that the next night will do as well. 
The next night comes, and with it the same causes for 
postponement, and so on. Having given you the his- 
tory of a da} 7 , it will serve for a year, and I am per- 
suaded that you will not require a second edition of it." 
He had kept his overseers under his hand all the time 
he was President ; had not forgotten to w r rite to Dr. 
Young upon methods of cultivation ; had shown the 
same passion as ever for speeding and regulating at 
its best every detail of his private business ; but matters 
had gone ill for lack of his personal supervision. He 
was obliged to sell no less than fifty thousand dollars' 
worth of his lands in the course of four or five years to 
defray the great expenses he was put to in the Presi- 
dency and the cost of bringing his estate into solvent 
shape again. He did not try to begin anew ; he only 
set things in order, and kept his days serene. 

A spark of war was kindled by the new administra- 
tion's dealings with France, and Washington was called 
once more to prepare for command, should the fighting 
leave the sea and come ashore. Put formal war did not 
come. The flurry only kept him a little nearer the 
movements of politics than he cared to be. He was the 



THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 31 1 

more uneasy to see how the Democrats bore themselves 
in the presence of the moment's peril ; doubted the ex- 
pediency of assigning men of that party to places of 
command in the army ; approved the laws passed against 
aliens and against those who should utter seditious libel 
against the government; showed again, and without re- 
serve, how deeply his affections were engaged on the 
side of the institutions he had so labored to set up and 
protect ; was intolerant towards any who sought to 
touch or question at any point their new authority — 
imperious as of old in question of action. 

But it was his home that chiefly held his thought 
now. He had not changed towards his friends through 
all the long years of public care and engrossing business. 
An old comrade, who had come in his rough frontier 
dress all the way from far Kentucky to Philadelphia to 
see the President, had been told " that Washington had 
become puffed up with the importance of his station, 
and was too much of an aristocrat to welcome him in 
that garb." But the old soldier was not daunted, press- 
ed on to make his call, and came back to tell his friends 
how the President and his lady had both seen him and 
recognized him from the window, and had hurried to 
the door to draw him cordially in. " I never was 
better treated," he said. " I had not believed a word 
against him ; and I found that he was ' Old Hoss ' still." 
'Twas the same with his neighbors, and with strangers 
too. He was the simple gentleman of the old days. A 
strolling actor, riding Mount Vernon way on a day in 
July, stopped to help a man and woman who had been 
thrown from their chaise, and did not recognize the stal- 
wart horseman who galloped up to his assistance till 
the overturned vehicle had been set up again, they had 



312 GEORGE WASHINGTON 

dusted each the other's coat, and the stately stranger, 
saying he had had the pleasure of seeing him play in 
Philadelphia, had bidden him come to the house yonder 
and be refreshed. " Have I the honor of addressing 
General Washington ?" exclaimed the astonished player. 
" An odd sort of introduction, Mr. Bernard," smiled the 
heated soldier ; " but I am pleased to find you can play 
so active a part in private, and without a prompter." 

Those who saw him now at Mount Vernon thought 
him gentler with little children than Mrs. Washington 
even, and remembered how he had always shown a like 
love and tenderness for them, going oftentimes out of 
his way to warn them of danger, with a kindly pat on 
the head, when he saw them watching the soldiers in 
the war days. Now all at Mount Vernon looked for- 
ward to the evening. That " was the children's hour." 
He had written sweet Nelly Custis a careful letter of 
advice upon love matters, half grave, half pla3 T ful, in the 
midst of his Presidency, when the troubles with Eng- 
land were beginning to darken ; she had always found 
him a comrade, and had loved him with an intimacy 
very few could know. Now she was to be married, to 
his own sister's son, and upon his birthday, February 
22d, 1799. She begged him to wear the " grand em- 
broidered uniform," just made for the French war, at 
her wedding; but he shook his head and donned in- 
stead the worn buff and blue that had seen real cam- 
paigns. Then the delighted girl told him, with her 
arm about his neck, that she loved him better in that. 

The quiet days went by without incident. He served 
upon a petty jury of the county when summoned ; and 
was more than content to be the simple citizen again, 
great duties put by, small ones diligently resumed. 



THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 313 

Once and again his anger flamed at perverse neglects 
and tasks ill done. Even while he was President, he 
had stormed to find his horses put to the chariot with 
unpolished hoofs upon a day of ceremony. But old age, 
and the consciousness of a lifework done, had added 
serenity now to his self-control ; and at last the end 
came, when he was ready. On the 12th of December, 
1799, he was chilled through by the keen winds and 
cold rain and sleet that beat upon him as he went his 
round about the farms. He spent the evening cheer- 
fully, listening to his secretary read ; but went to bed 
with a gathering hoarseness and cold, and woke in the 
night sharply stricken in his throat. Physicians came 
almost at dawn, but the disease was already beyond 
their control. Nothing that they tried could stay it ; 
and by evening the end had come. He was calm the 
day through, as in a time of battle ; knowing what be- 
tided, but not fearing it; steady, noble, a warrior figure 
to the last; and he died as those who loved him might 
have wished to see him die. 

The country knew him when he was dead : knew 
the majesty, the nobility, the unsullied greatness of the 
man who was gone, and knew not whether to mourn 
or give praise. He could not serve them any more; 
but they saw his light shine already upon the future as 
upon the past, and were glad. They knew him now 
the Happy Warrior, 

"Whose powers shed round him, in the common strife 
Or mild concerns of ordinary life, 
A constant influence, a peculiar grace, 
But who, if he be called upon to face 
Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined 
Great issues, good or bad 4 for humankind, 



314 



GEORGE WASHINGTON 



Is happy as a Lover; and attired 
With sudden brightness, like a man inspired ; 
And, through the heat of conflict, keeps the law 
In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw. 
******* 

A soul whose master-bias leans 
To homefelt pleasures and to gentle scenes ; 

******* 
More brave for this, that he hath much to love:- 
* * * the man, who, lifted high, 
Conspicuous object in a nation's eye, 
Or left unthottght of in obscurity, — 
Who, with a toward or untoward lot, 
Prosperous or adverse, to his wish or not, 
Plays, in the many games of life, that one 
Where what he most doth value must be won." 




INDEX 



Acts of Trade, 121. 

Adams, John, represents Massa- 
chusetts in Congress at Phila- 
delphia, 154 ; character of, 156- 
157 ; opinion of, .concerning Ma- 
ryland and Virginia delegates to 
Congress at Philadelphia, 158 ; 
accused as rebel at Congress, 
161-162 ; proposes Washington 
as commander of Continental 
army, 173 ; mentioned, 174, 188, 
198; Vice-President with Wash- 
ington, 279 ; elected Vice-Presi- 
dent the second time, 301 ; in- 
augurated as President, 309. 

Adams, Samuel, represents Massa- 
chusetts in Congress at Phila- 
delphia, 154; character of, 155, 
156 ; accused as rebel at Con- 
gress, 161-162. 

Ajax, Washington's horse, men- 
tioned, 110. 

Alexandria, recruiting at, for west- 
ern expedition, 71, 77 ; Wash- 
ington rejoins regiment at, 78 ; 
Braddock's regiment at, 82 ; 
Braddock calls council of gov- 
ernors at, 83; Potomac commis- 
sioners adjourn from, to Mount 
Vernon, 252. 

Allen, Ethan, takes possession of 
Ticonderoga, 171. 

Ames, Fisher, comment of, on in- 
auguration of Washington, 272 

Amherst, General, takes Louis- 
bourg, 93. 

Annapolis, Washington resigns 
commission at, 226 ; conference 
of States at, 254. 



Army, Continental, created by 
Congress, 173; Washington takes 
command of, 180 ; unsatisfacto- 
ry condition of, 182 ; desertions 
from, 191; hardships of, at Val- 
ley Forge, 199 ; trained by Steu- 
ben, 200 ; difficulty in maintain- 
ing, 206 ; treatment of, after the 
war, 218 ; efforts of Washington 
in behalf of, 221; Washington's 
loss of popularity with, 222; dis- 
affection in, 222-223; resolution 
passed by officers of, 223. 

Army and navy, steps for forma- 
tion of, 295. 

Arnold, Benedict, attempt of, to 
capture Quebec, 183 ; Carleton 
checked by, 194, 198; at Sara- 
toga, 195 ; treason of, 207. 

Articles of Confederation, adopted 
by states, 213 ; effect of, 214. 

Asgill, Captain Charles, incident 
of, 225 ; Washington s gratifica- 
tion at release of, 225. 

Attorney-General, creation of of- 
fice of, by Congress, 277. 

Barter, Philip, Washington's 
gardener, makes agreement with 
Washington, 240. 

Beaujeu leads attack on Brad- 
dock and is killed, 88. 

Beausejour, expedition planned 
against, 84 ; taken, 90. 

Bel voir, seat of William Fairfax, 
51 ; life at, 53 ; referred to, 
107. 

Bennington, Vermont, attack on, 
195. 



316 



INDEX 



Berkeley, Sir William, resigns Vir- 
ginia lo the Commonwealth, 13. 

Bernard, an actor, meeting of, with 
Washington, 312. 

Betty, Parson, description of, by 
Colonel Byrd, 35. 

Beverley, Robert, writings and 
character of, 31-32 ; character- 
ization of Virginia by, 32 ; on 
Virginian hospitality, 50. 

Bishop, servant of Washington, at 
Mrs. Custis's, 100 ; pensioned by 
Washington, 241. 

Blair, James, " commissary " to the 
Bishop of London in Virginia, 
character, influence, and breed- 
ing of, 36-37. 

Blair, John, President of Virginia 
Council, 139; appointed delegate 
to Philadelphia conference, 257 ; 
appointed to Supreme Court, 281. 

Bland, Richard, referred to, in con- 
nection with debate of Stamp 
Act, 130 ; referred to, 135 ; pam- 
phlet of, on colonial rights, 138 ; 
chosen delegate to Congress at 
Philadelphia, 148 ; votes re- 
ceived by, as delegate to Con- 
gress, 161 ; opposes Henry in 
convention, 170; mentioned, 172; 
death of, 234. 

Blueskin, Washington's horse, 
mentioned, 110. 

Board of Trade, search-warrants 
issued by, 122. 

Boston, Washington visits, in 1756, 
92; troops sent to, 140; massa- 
cre in, 145 ; "Tea Party," 148 ; 
port of, closed, 148; fresh troops 
sent to, 168; Continental troops 
in front of, 171 ; reinforced by 
General Howe. 179 ; evacuation 
of, by British, 185 ; Washington 
occupies, 185 ; D'Estaing's fleet 
at, 204. 

Boston News Letter, referred to, 
121. 

Botetourt, Lord, appointed Gov- 
ernor-General of Virginia, 139 ; 
attempts to dissolve House of 
Burgesses, 140 ; attitude of, tow- 
ards colonists, 141 ; death of, 
141. 



Bowdoin, Governor, of Massachu- 
setts, urges convention of states, 
253. 

Braddock, Major-General Edward, 
made commander-in-chief in 
America, 81; "a veiy Iroquois 
in disposition, "81; invites Wash- 
ington to his staff, 83 ; plan of, 
for attacking Fort Duquesne, 
84 ; force of, against Fort Du- 
quesne, 85 ; advance of, upon 
Duquesne, 85-86 ; unreasonable 
temper of, on the advance, 86 ; 
defeat of, 86 ff. ; stupid tactics 
of, 87 ; bravery of, 88 ; death of, 
89 ; buried in the road, 89 ; losses 
in force of, 89 ; papers of, taken 
at Duquesne, 90 ; former master 
of Washington's servant, 100 ; 
referred to, 161. 

Brandywine, the, Washington de- 
feated at, 196. 

Brest, French fleet blockaded at, 
207. 

Bridges' Creek, homestead of Au- 
gustine Washington, birthplace 
of George, 40-41 ; Washington 
with his brother Augustine at, 
51. 

Brou'lie, Prince de, 216. 

Bunker Hill, battle of, 179-180. 

Burgesses, House of, Governor 
Spotswoodon education of mem- 
bers of, 38 ; Augustine Wash- 
ton in, 46 ; quarrels with Din- 
widdle about land fee, 69; grants 
money for an expedition to the 
Ohio, 71 ; thanks Washington 
for service at Great Meadows, 
77 ; votes more money against 
the French, 79 ; appoints com- 
mittee to spend money granted, 
79 ; thanks Washington for his 
services with Braddock, 91 ; 
Washington chosen member of. 
103 ; Washington's election ex- 
penses to the, 109 ; temper of, 
at time of Washington's en- 
trance, 113 ; memorial of, to 
King, protesting against Stamp 
Act, 124-125; action of, on 
resolutions concerning taxa- 
tion, 125; dissolved by Gov- 



INDEX 



317 



ernor Fauquier, 133 ; attempt of 
Botetourt to dissolve, 140 ; res- 
olution of, against importing 
taxed articles, 140 ; convened 
by Dnnmore, 146 ; resolves to 
urge a Congress of all the colo- 
nies, 148 ; gives a ball to Lady 
Dunmore, 148 ; last meeting of, 
172, 

Burgoyne, General, plan of cam- 
paign of, 194 ; capture of Ticon- 
deroga by, 195 ; movements of, 
195; capitulation of, 195, 197. 

Burke, Edmund, knowledge of, of 
temper of colonies, 117. 

Burnaby, Rev. Andrew, Vicar of 
Greenwich, views of, on public 
character of Virginians in 1759, 
120. 

Byrd, Colonel William, remark of, 
concerning exploration of the 
interior, 12 ; remark of, concern- 
ing character of New-England- 
ers, 12 ; on the powers of colo- 
nial governors, 26; character and 
breeding of, 32 ft".; influence of, 
in development of Virginia. 33- 
34 ; undaunted spirits of, 34-35 ; 
characteristics of, as a writer, 33- 
35 ; remark of, about North 
Carolina, 34, 38 ; description of 
Mr. Betty by, 35; on Captain 
Washington's management of 
iron mines, 45; opinion of, re- 
garding taxation, 119-120 ; re- 
mark of, 120. 

Camden, Cornwallis routs Gates 
at, 205. 

Carleton, Sir Guy, attempt of, on 
Champlain. 

Carr, Dabney, meets with Henry 
and others to discuss colonial af- 
fairs, 146. 

C;irtngena, Lawrence Washington 
at siege of. 47-48. 

Cary, Miss, Washington's relations 
with, 101. 

Cary, Robert, & Company, Wash- 
ington's factors in London, 105; 
carefully watched by Washing- 
ton, 112. 

Champlain, Lake, the French es- 



tablished upon, 61 ; attempt at 
capture of, by Carleton, 194. 

Charleston, creation of, 18 ; a cen- 
tre for pirates, 21 ; taking of, 
by Clinton, 205. 

Charlestown, occupied by Conti- 
nental troops, 179 ; captured by 
British, 180. 

Chastellux, Marquis de, 216, 217, 
218 ; Washington's congratula- 
tions of, on his miirt iage, 260. 

Chatham, Lord, knowledge of, of 
temper of colonies, 117; com- 
ment of, on Rockingham's " de- 
claratory act," 138 ; advocates 
conciliation of America, 167. 

Chinkling, Washington's horse, 
mentioned, 110. 

Church, position of Established, 
in colonial Virginia, 8. 

Clark, George Rogers, drives Brit- 
ish from the Illinois, 204. 

Clinton, General, succeeds General 
Howe, 202 ; ordered to have 
Phihidelphia, 202; attacked by 
Washington at Monmouth Court 
House, 202 ; withdraws to New 
York, 203 ; troops sent by, take 
Savannah, 204 ; goes south, 205; 
captures Charleston, 205; returns 
north, 205. 

Colonies, English, in America, 
population and condition of, in 
1732, 4; individual development 
of, 4-5 ; contrast between Vir- 
ginia and New England, 9, 13- 
14; expansion of, after the Res- 
toration, 17-18; expulsion of the 
Dutch from, 17; mixture of 
population in middle and south- 
ern, 18-19; exchange of popula- 
tion amongst, 19 ; nature of set- 
tlement of, 20; operation of 
the Navigation Acts upon, 20 ; 
smuggling and privateering 
in, 21; piracy in, 21-22 ; irrita- 
tion of, with regard to Naviga- 
tion Acts, 22 ; early effects of the 
French power on, 23 ft'. ; stub- 
born separateness and indepen- 
dence of, in respect of govern- 
ment, 23-27; drawn into Euro- 
pean politics by presence of the 



318 



INDEX 



French iu North America, 25; 
separate action of, in dealing 
with the French, 25-26; first 
feeling of independence among, 
113-114; effect of close of 
French war on, 113; taxation of, 
best imposed by Parliament, 118; 
resistance to port dues in, 122 ; 
Stamp Act imposed on, 123-124; 
spread of Henry's resolutions 
through, 134; delegates of, as- 
semble in New York, 134 ; cus- 
tom-house and revenue commis- 
sioners created for, 139; attitude 
of, towards Massachusetts, 154- 
155; adopt Articles of Confed- 
eration, 213. 

Concord, fighting begins at, 170. 

Conference, at Annapolis, signifi- 
cance of, 254; at Philadelphia. 
256; twelve states represented 
in, 258 ; frames constitution, 
259; adjournment of, 259. 

Congress, delegates to, from Vir- 
ginia, 148; at Philadelphia, 149; 
delegates to, from Massachusetts, 
154; unfitness of, for counsel, 
157 ; leadership of Virginian 
delegates in, 158-159; forms 
declaration of rights. 164-165; 
adjournment of, 165 ; second 
Continental, meets at Philadel- 
phia (1775), 171; business trans- 
acted by, 171; appoints Wash- 
ington commander of Continen- 
tal Army, 173; removes to Balti- 
more. 191; Washington's power 
increased by, 194 ; inefficiency 
of, 197, 2061 policy of, with re- 
gard to western lands, 247; Wash- 
ington urges increase of power 
of, 248; inability of, to pay na- 
tional debts, 249 ; Washington's 
letter to Lee on contempt for 
authority of, 254 ; indifference 
of, towards Hamilton's proposal, 
256; weakness of, in face of re- 
bellion, 256; sanctions confer- 
ence at Philadelphia, 256; con- 
vening of first, under the Con- 



stitution, 



organizes vari- 



ous departments, 277; meas- 
ures adopted by, for settle- 



ment of public debt, 284; bill 
defeated in, for assumption of 
state debts by government, 285; 
compromise in, effected by Jef- 
ferson, 287; taxes levied by, 
293; division in, over constiiu- 
tional powers, 294; changes in, 
301; lays taxes on distilled Spir- 
its, 302. 

Congress at New York, delegates 
sent to, by nine colonies, 134; 
bill of rights and immunities 
passed by, 134. 

Connecticut fails to send delegates 
to Annapolis conference, 254. 

Constitution, framed by confer- 
ence at Philadelphia, 259; im- 
partial interest of Washington 
in discussions of, 259; adoption 
of, 260. 

Contrecceur, commander at Du- 
quesne, against Braddock, 87-88. 

Corbin, Richard, acquaints Wash- 
ington with his commission as 
lieutenant-colonel, 72. 

Corn wal lis, Lord, advances to meet 
Washington, 192; defeat of de- 
tachment of, at Princeton, 193 ; 
retreat of, to New York, 193 ; 
defeats Gates at Camden, 205; 
defeat of, at King's Mountain, 
North Carolina, 208 ; forced into 
Virginia, 208; at Yorktown, 208, 
209; surrender of, 209; admira- 
tion of, for Washington, 209. 

Craik, Dr., accompanies Washing- 
ton on western journey, 242. 

Crawford, Captain, correspond- 
ence of, with Washington, 143. 

Criminals, hired for private service 
in colonial Virginia, 7; importa- 
tion of, for servants, 45. 

Cromwell, Oliver, the instrument 
and representative of a minor- 
ity, 10. 

Crown Point, a French post at, 61; 
William Johnson chosen to lead 
attack upon, 84 ; Johnson does 
not reach. 90 ; taken possession 
of by insurgents, 171. 

Culpeper County, Washington 
made official surveyor for, 56. 

Cushing, Thomas, represents Mas- 



INDEX 



319 



saclmsetts in Congress at Phila- 
delphia, 154. 

Cashing, William, appointed to 
Supreme Court, 281. 

Custis, Daniel Parke, first husband 
of Martha Custis, 99 ; leaves 
property to wife and children, 
104. 

Custis, "Jack," placed at King's 
College by Washington, 147; 
married, 147, 174 ; death of, 
224. 

Custis, Martha, meets with Wash- 
ington, 99 ; previous life of, 
99-100 ; Washington becomes 
engaged to, 101; marriage of, to 
Washington, 102. 

Custis, Nelly, marriage of, 312. 

Custis, " Patsy," death of, 147. 

Dandridge, Francis, Washing- 
ton writes to, about Stamp Act, 
134. 

Deane, Silas, opinion of, of South- 
ern delegates to Congress at 
Philadelphia, 158. 

Declaration of independence, mo 
tion for, adopted, 187. 

De Lancey, James, Governor of 
New York, consults with Brad- 
dock at Alexandria, 83. 

Delaware, crossed by Washington, 
191; forts on, taken b}^ Howe, 
197 ; delegates from, to Annap 
olis conference, 254. 

Department of Foreign Affairs, 
organization of, 277. 

Department of State organized by 
Congress, 277. 

Department of the Treasury, or- 
ganization of, 277. 

Department of War organized by 
Congress, 277. 

Dickinson, John, 170. 

Dieskau, Count, defeated by John- 
son at Lake George, 90. 

Dinwiddie, Governor, appoints 
Washington adjutant-general of 
a military district. 58; member 
of Ohio company, 62-64 ; activ- 
ity of, against the French, 62-64; 
authorized to warn the French 
from the Ohio, 63 ; sends Wash 



ington to convey warning. 64 ; 
correspondence of, with Law- 
rence Washington, 64; speaks of 
young Washington as ";i per- 
son of distinction," 64 ; contest 
with the Burgesses on the land 
fee, 69 ; orders a draft of mili- 
tia to be sent to the Ohio, 69 ; 
feeling of, towards the Burgess- 
es, 70; orders Washington's jour- 
nal to the Ohio printed, 70; im- 
patience of, to reattack the 
French, 78 ; resolves militia iu- 
to independent companies, 79 ; 
restrained in expenditure of 
money by committee of Bur- 
gesses, 79 ; consults with Brad- 
dock at Alexandria, 83; on the 
cowardice of Colonel Dunbar, 
90. 

Dorchester Heights, 179 ; occu- 
pied by Washington, 184. 

Dunbar, Colonel, given command 
of Braddock's rear division, 86 ; 
craven behavior of, after Brad- 
dock's defeat, 90. 

Dunmore, John Murray, Earl of, 
becomes governor of Virginia, 
145 ; convenes House of Bur- 
gesses, 146 ; reports of, on con- 
dition of Virginia, 168; lands 
troops near Williamsburg, 170 ; 
flight of, 172; raids of, upon 
Virginia, 186-187. 

Duplaine, French consul at Bos- 
ton, 300. 

Duquesne, the Marquis, becomes 
governor on the St. Lawrence, 
60 ; forestalls the English in the 
west, 62. 

Duquesne, Fort, built by French 
on the Ohio, 73 ; Braddock's 
plan for attacking, 84; Virgin- 
ian route to, chosen by Brad- 
dock, 85 ; Braddock's defeat at, 
86-89 ; General Forbes sent to 
command expedition against, 
93 ; taken and renamed Fort 
Pitt, 94; Forbes's preparations 
for advancing against, 100. 

Dutch, conquest of the, in Amer- 
ica, 17; presence of, in New York 
and Pennsylvania, 18. 



320 



INDEX 



Eden, Charles, Governor of North 
Carolina, accompanies Wash- 
ington to Philadelphia, 143. 

Edict of Nantes, Revocation of, 
sends Huguenots to America, 
18. 

Education, unsystematic charac- 
ter of, in early Virginia, 29-30. 

Elkton, Howe * lands troops at, 
196. 

England, compelled to act for 
herself against the French in 
America by the colonies, 27 ; 
neglects government of colonies, 
117-118 ; attitude of, towards 
United States, 248 ; war of, with 
France, 297; covert hostilities 
of, against United States, 302 ; 
John Jay sent to, 302; treaty 
with, effected by John Jay, 304. 

Estaiug, Count d', appears off 
New York, 203; refits fleet, 204. 

Fairfax, Anne, marries Law- 
rence Washington, 48 ; family 
connections of, 48-49. 

Fairfax, George, Washington's 
companion in western survey- 
ing, 54. 

Fairfax, Thomas, third Lord, sum- 
mons Colonel H. Washington 
at Worcester, 48-49. 

Fairfax, Thomas, sixth Baron, es- 
tates of, in Northern Neck, 49 ; 
life and character of. 49-50 ; 
establishes himself in Virginia, 
49-50; liking of, for Washing- 
ton, 53; employs Washington 
as surveyor, 53-56; purpose of, 
in coming to America. 54 ; chief 
in hunting parties, 109. 

Fairfax, William, family and ca- 
reer of, 48-49; president of the 
King's Council, 50-51; Belvoir, 
seat of, 51, 53; influence of, upon 
Washington, 51-53; cheers 
Washington at the frontier, 92. 

Fauquier, Francis, Governor of 
Virginia, present at Washing- 
ton's marriage, 102 ; dissolves 
House of Burgesses, 133 ; tastes 
of, 136 ; death of, 139. 

Federal Hall, New York City, 



Washington takes oath of office 
in, 269. 

Federalists support Washington, 
301. 

Finns in Pennsylvania, 18. 

Forbes, General, sent to Virginia 
to command against Fort Du- 
quesne, 93; takes Duquesne, 94; 
preparations of, for advancing 
against Duquesne, 100. 

Fort Cumberland, built by Cap 
tain Innes at Will's Creek, 78 ; 
Braddock at, 85 ; deserted by 
Colonel Dunbar, 90. 

"Fort Necessity," Washington's 
intrenohments at Great Mead- 
ows. 75. 

Fort Pitt, Fort Duquesne renamed, 
94 ; left in charge of Colonel fier- 
cer, 101. 

Fort Washington, surrender of, by 
General Greene, 190. 

Fort William Henry taken by the 
French, 90. 

France, money loaned by, 199 ; 
forms alliance with United States, 
201 ; United States in debt to, 249 ; 
effects of Revolution in, on Amer- 
ica, 289; progress of Revolution 
in, 292 ; Washington's attitude 
towards, 290-292, 296; at war 
with England, 297; war of, with 
United States threatened, 310. 

Franklin, Benjamin, on Braddoek's 
plan for attacking Fort Du- 
quesne, 84 ; remark of, 197. 

Fraunce's Tavern, Washington's 
farewell to officers at, 226. 

Frederick County, Washington 
chosen member of House of 
Burgesses for, 103. 

Frederick the Great, provokes for- 
mation of league against himself, 
80, 193; comment of, 203. 

Fredericksburg, 228, 265. 

French, in Pennsylvania and the 
southern colonies, 18; threaten- 
ing power of, in North America, 
22 ff. ; development of conquest 
bv, in America, 23; hold of, upon 
the fur trade, 23-24 ; effect of 
power of. upon relations of col- 
onies to England, 25 ; separate 



INDEX 



321 



action of colonies in dealing 
will), 25-26; indecisive wars 
with, in America, 27; movements 
of, in the West, 1752, 59-60 ; ag- 
gressive efficiency of, 60; warned 
from the Ohio by Dinwiddie, 
64-66 ; at Fort Le Bceuf, 65 ; 
claims of, to the West. 66 ; seize 
fort at forks of the Ohio, 71 ; in- 
crease their force on the Ohio, 
72; build Fort Duquesne, 73; at- 
tacked by Washington near Great 
Meadows, 73-74; profess friend- 
ship for the English, 80-81 ; send 
reinforcements to Canada, 81 ; 
force of, against Braddock, 87 ; 
lose Louisbourg, 93, Duquesne, 
94, Quebec, 95 ; volunteer for 
service in America, 200; respect 
of, for Washington, 215. 

French and Indian War, begun by 
Washington, 73-74; action in, at 
Great Meadows, 74-75 ; Brad- 
dock made commander-in-chief 
in, 81; Braddock's defeat in, 86 
ff. ; goes heavily against the Eng- 
lish, 90; drags upon the frontier, 
91 ; goes against the French, 93- 
95; effect of close of, on colo- 
nies, 113; close of, 114. 

French Revolution, beginning of, 
289; progress of, 292; Washing- 
ton's attitude towards, 290-292, 
296. 

Fry, Colonel Joshua, made com- 
mander of western expedition, 
72 ; dies, 73. 

Fur trade, earlv rivalry of French 
and English In the, 23-25; effort 
of the English to control, at Os- 
wego, 61. 

Gage, General, 170. 

Galloway, Joseph, leader of Penn- 
sylvania delegation, 164; propo- 
sition of, in Congress, 164. 

Gardoqui insists on closing the 
Mississippi, 254. 

Gaspe, schooner, destruction of, 
146. 

Gates, General, 198 ; defeated at 
Camden, South Carolina, 205. 

Genet, Edmond Charles, minister 
21 



from France, 297 ; conduct of, 
in America, 298 ; plans of, de- 
feated by Washington, 298 ; re- 
call of, 300. 

Georgia, prevented by governor 
from sending delegates to " con- 
gress " in New York, 134; over- 
run by British, 204; fails to 
send delegates to Annapolis con- 
ference, 255. 

Germans, in Pennsylvania and 
Virginia, 18 ; settle in valley of 
Shenandoah, 61; Pennsylvanian, 
oppose war with France, 63 ; 
attacked by Indians on Virgin- 
ian frontier, 91 ; volunteer for 
service in America, 200. 

Germantown, battle of, 197. 

Gist, Christopher, agent, of Ohio 
Company, 65; goes with Wash- 
ington to warn the French, 65 ; 
solicitude of, for Washington, 
66. 

Gooch, William, Governor of Vir- 
ginia, 40. 

Grafton referred to, 139. 

Grasse, Count de, co-operates with 
Washington before Yorktown, 
209. 

Great Meadows, Washington en- 
camps at. 73; "a charming field 
for an encounter," 73 ; Wash- 
ington attacked by Villiers at, 
74-75 ; bought by Washington, 
144; referred to, 161. 

Greene, General, surrender of 
Fort Washington by, 190 ; har- 
asses Cornwallis in North Caro- 
lina, 208. 

Greenway Court, built by Lord 
Fairfax, 50 ; Washington at, 
55-56; referred to, 107. 

Grenville, George, Prime -Minis- 
ter, favors direct taxation of 
colonies, 119; attempt of, to en- 
force collection of port dues, 

122 ; proposes Stamp Act, and 
billeting of troops in colonies, 

123 ; referred to, 139. 
Gunston Hall, centre of sport, 109. 

Hamilton, Alexander, address of, 
to the states, 255 ; previous rec- 



322 



INDEX 



ord of, 256 ; favors adoption 
of Constitution, 259 ; urges 
Washington to accept presi- 
dency, 262; referred to,* 273; 
appointed Secretary of Treas- 
ury, 278; Washington's reasons 
for choice of, 279 ; policy of, 
282-283 ; plans of, for settle- 
ment of public debt, 284 ; Jef- 
ferson's envy of, 287 ; relations 
of, with Washington, 288 ; re- 
ferred to, 292 ; arguments of, for 
National Bank, 294 ; attacked 
in the House by Madison, 301; 
defence of Washington by, 305 ; 
referred to, 307 ; Washington 
asks advice of, 308. 

Hamilton, Governor, of Pennsyl- 
vania, acts with Ohio Company, 
63. 

Hancock, Governor, of Massachu- 
setts, visit of, to Washington, 
282. 

Hard wick, Washington's overseer, 
108. 

Harlem Heights, fight at, 190. 

Harrison, Benjamin, chosen dele- 
gate to a congress in Philadel- 
phia, 148; referred to, 157; votes 
received by, as delegate to con- 
gress, 161 ; opposes Henry in 
convention, 170 ; mentioned, 
172 ; Governor of Virginia, 234. 

Harrison, R. H., appointed to 
Supreme Court, 281. 

Hawley, Joseph, advice of, to rep- 
resentatives of Massachusetts at 
Philadelphia, 155 ; referred to, 
158. 

Hay, Anthony, Burgesses meet at 
house of, 140. 

Henry, Patrick, family and char- 
acter of, 126-127 ; entrance of, 
into House of Burgesses, 127; 
appearance and dress of, 127 ; 
comparison of, with Washing- 
ton, 127 ; previous life of, 128; 
leadership of, in debate of Stamp 
Act, 128-129 ; triumph of, in de- 
bate of Stamp Act, 132; influence 
on colonies of resolutions of, 134; 
recognized as a leader, 138 ; 
meets with Jefferson and others 



to discuss colonial affairs, 146 ; 
chosen delegate to Congress at 
Philadelphia, 148-149 ; leader- 
ship of, in Congress at Philadel- 
phia, 159 ; votes received by, as 
delegate to Congress, 161 ; criti- 
cised for boldness, 163 ; referred 
to, 165 ; advocates arming col- 
onists, 169; heads militiamen 
against Duumore, 171; mention- 
ed, 172 ; chosen governor of 
Virginia, 234 ; appointed dele- 
gate to conference at Philadel- 
phia, 257 ; opposes Constitution, 
260 ; referred to, 280. 

Hessians surrendered to Wash- 
ington, 192. 

Holland, United States in debt to, 
249. 

Howe, Admiral Lord, assists Gen- 
eral Howe at New York, 189 ; 
offers pardon for submission, 
189, 191. 

Howe, General William, reinforces 
Boston, 179 ; evacuates Boston, 
185 ; forces Washington from 
Brooklyn Heights, 189; plans of, 
194 ; movements of, 195 ; ad- 
vanceof,on Philadelphiachecked 
by Washington, 196; landing 
of, at Elkton, 196 ; defeats 
Washington at the Brandy wine, 
196 ; enters Philadelphia, 197 ; 
attacked by Washington at Ger- 
mantown, 197 ; winters at Phila- 
delphia, 197 ; resigns command, 
202. 

Illinois, the French in the coun- 
try of the, 23. 

Independent Company, temper of, 
from South Carolina at Great 
Meadows, 73 ; from New York 
fails to join Washington against 
the French, 76 ; from New York 
and from South Carolina at Fort 
Cumberland, 78 ; from New 
York with Braddock, 85. 

Indians, Ohio Company, makes in- 
terest with, 61-62; Washington's 
efforts to retain friendship of, for 
the English, 66; with Villiers at 
Great Meadows, 75 ; Washing- 



INDEX 



323 



ton's struggle with the, on the 
frontier, 91-92 ; desert French 
at Duquesne, 93-94. 
Iunes, Captain, builds Fort Cum- 
berland at Will's Creek, 78. 

Jay, John, supports proposition 
of Rutledge in Congress, 164 ; 
proposition of, concerning Mis- 
sissippi, 246 ; favors adoption 
of Constitution, 259 ; appointed 
chief-justice, 281 ; sent by Wash- 
ington to England, 302 ; provi- 
sions of treaty effected by, 304. 

Jefferson, Thomas, referred to, 
137 ; meets with Henry and 
others to discuss colonial affairs, 
146 ; becomes governor of Vir- 
ginia, 234 ; appointed Secretary 
of State, 278 ; Washington's rea- 
sons for choice of, 279 ; compro- 
mise in Congress effected by, 287 ; 
envy of, of Hamilton, 287 ; re- 
lation of, with Washington, 288 ; 
French influences on, 289 ; op- 
position of, to National Bank, 
293 ; letter to, from Washington, 
concerning United States policy 
towards France, 297 ; neutrality 
violated by, 299 ; leaves the 
cabinet, 301 ; remark of, on 
Whiskey Rebellion, 304; re- 
ferred to, 307. 

Johnson, Governor, of Maryland, 
urges Washington to accept 
presidency, 261. 

Johnson, Colonel William, chosen 
to lead attack on Crown Point, 
84; beats Dieskau at Lake 
George, 90. 

Jones, Rev. Hugh, author of Pres- 
ent State of Virginia, 36. 

Jones, John Paul, 205. 

Jumonville, M., killed near Great 
Meadows, 74 ; death of, begins 
French and Indian War, 74, 80. 

Keith, Sir William, Governor of 
Pennsylvania, suggestion of, for 
taxation of colonies, 118 ; re- 
ferred to. 119. 

Keppel, Admiral, commands fleet 
sent to Virginia, 81. 



Knox, General, Washington's fare- 
well to, 226 ; letter to, from 
Washington, 266 ; made Secre- 
tary of War, 278. 

Knyphausen, General, left by Clin- 
ton in charge of New York, 205. 

Lafayette, Marquis de, volunteers 
for service in America, 200, 202; 
harasses Cornwallis in Virginia, 
208 ; letter of Washington to, 
237 ; remark of, concerning 
Washington's home life, 239 ; 
sends hounds to Washington, 
243 ; becomes people's leader in 
French Revolution, 290. 

Lake George, Dieskau beaten by 
Johnson at, 90. 

Land fee, protest of the Virginia 
Burgesses concerning, 69. 

Laurie, Dr., comes to Mount Ver- 
non drunk. 109. 

Lee, Arthur, referred to, 141. 

Lee, Charles, 168 ; second in com- 
mand to Washington, 191; taken 
prisoner, 191; treachery of, 202. 

Lee, Henry (" Light -horse Har- 
ry"). 208. 

Lee, Richard Henry, referred to, 
132 ; forms association for re- 
sistance to Stamp Act, 135 ; 
meets with Henry and others to 
discuss colonial affairs, 146; 
chosen delegate to Congress at 
Philadelphia, 148 ; leadership of, 
in Congress at Philadelphia, 159; 
votes received by, as delegate 
to Congress, 161 ; interview of, 
with Massachusetts delegates, 
161-162 ; referred to, 166 ; men- 
tioned, 172 ; motion of, for dec- 
laration of independence, 187 ; 
harasses Cornwallis in North 
Carolina, 208, 235; Washing- 
ton's letter to, on contempt for 
authority of Congress, 254 ; op- 
poses Constitution, 260; referred 
to, 280. 

Lee, Thomas, president of Ohio 
Company, 64. 

Lewis, Mrs., sister of Washington, 
228. 

Lexington, battle of, 170. 



324 



INDEX 



Lincoln, General, taken prisoner, 
205. 

Lippincott, Captain, hangs Ameri- 
can officer, 224. 

Little Sarah, the, 299. 

Livingston, Chancellor of New 
York, administers oath of office 
to Washington, 269. 

Louisbourg taken by Amherst, 93. 

Lower Brandon, estate of Ben- 
jamin Harrison, 234. 

Lynch, Mr., delegate from South 
Carolina to Congress at Phila- 
delphia, 158. 

Mackay, Captain of Independent 
Company from South Carolina, 
79. 

Mackenzie, Captain, letter of, to 
Washington, 162. 

Madison, James, leader in Virgini- 
an politics, 235; appointed dele- 
gate to Philadelphia conference, 
257; part of, in the conference, 
259; favors adoption of Consti- 
tution, 259 ; referred to, 274 ; 
opposes policy of Treasury De- 
partment, 295; attack of, on 
Hamilton, 301; Washington asks 
advice of, 308. 

Magnolia, Washington's horse, 
mentioned, 110. 

Marshall, John, becomes promi- 
nent, 235. 

Maryland, resolution of, to arm 
colonists, 169 ; takes measures for 
opening the Potomac, 246; com- 
missioners from, meet at Mount 
Vernon concerning Potomac, 
252 ; action of Assembly of, re- 
garding trade, 253 ; fails to send 
delegates to Annapolis confer- 
ence, 254. 

Mason, George, \irges Washington 
to guard his health, 94-95 ; Wash- 
ington stalking deer with, 110; 
conferences of, with Washington 
on state of colonies, 135; draws 
up resolution for House of Bur- 
gesses, 140; referred to, 166, 243, 
280; appointed delegate to Phil- 
adelphia conference, 257 ; op- 
poses Constitution, 260. 



J Massachusetts, independence of 
men of, 117 ; resents direct taxa- 
tion, 119; refuses standing grant 
to governor, 119; summons col- 
onies to send delegates to New 
York, 134; altitude of colonies 
to\vards,154-155 ; delegates from, 
at Congress, accused of rebellion, 
161-162; proclaimed in rebel- 
lion, 167-168 ; provincial con- 
gress formed in, and votes to 
equip militia of, 168; fails to 
send delegates to Annapolis con- 
ference, 254; rebellion in, 256; 
struggle in, over Constitution, 
260. 

Mercer, Colonel, engages Wash- 
ington by mistake, 94 ; Fort 
Pitt left in charge of, 102. 

Mifflin, Thomas, member of Con- 
gress at Philadelphia, 157. 

Mississippi, early power of the 
French on the, 23; closed to 
commerce by the Spanish, 245; 
opening of, 306. 

Monckton, Colonel, directed to 
attack Beauseiour in Acadia, 
84. 

Monmouth Court House, battle of, 
202. 

Monroe, James, becomes promi- 
nent, 235. 

Montgomery, General, captures 
Montreal, 183; death of, 183, 
215. 

Montreal captured by Montgom- 
ery, 183. 

Morgan, General, 198 ;' harasses 
Corn wal lis in North Carolina, 
208. 

Morris, Gouverneur, 292. 

Morris, Robert Hunter, Governor 
of Pennsylvania, consults with 
Braddock at Alexandria, 83. 

Morristown Heights, withdrawal 
of Washington to, 193. 

Mount Vernon, named after Ad- 
miral Vernon, 48 ; Washington 
as a boy at, 51-53, 56; Washing- 
ton visits, before Yorktown, 224; 
Washington returns to, after the 
war, 228; left in charge of Lund 
Washington, 233; many visitors 



INDEX 



325 



at, 237, 243; Washington's cor- 
respondence at, 250; meeting of 
Potomac commissioners at. 252; 
Washington leaves, to take presi- 
dency, 265; retires to private 
life at, 309. 

Moustier, Count de, French minis- 
ter to the United States, pre- 
sumption of, 276. 

Murray, John, Earl Dunmore. See 
Dim more. 

National Bank, foundation of, 
293. 

Navigation Acts, policy of the, 
towards the colonies, 20 ; eva- 
sion of the,21 ; irritation wrought 
by the, 22; advantages gained to 
the colonies by the, 22. 

Nelson, Washington's horse, 241. 

Nelson, William, president of Vir- 
ginia Council, 145. 

New Brunswick. British stores at, 
193. 

Newcastle, Duke of, aroused on 
the French war, 80. 

New England, peculiar character 
of population in, 9-10; persistent 
character of, amidst change, 10 ; 
modification of, 10-11 ; a body 
of churches, 11; population and 
condition of, at end of seven- 
teenth century, 11-12 ; separate 
life of, 11-12 ; difference be- 
tween, and Virginia accentuated 
under the Commonwealth, 13; 
emigration of congregations 
from, into New Jersey, 19; astir 
in the French war, 84. 

New Hampshire, fails to send del- 
egates to Annapolis conference, 
254; rebellion in, 256. 

New Jersey, establishment of, 18 ; 
emigration of New England con- 
gregations to, 19 ; sends dele- 
gates to Annapolis conference. 
254. 

New Orleans, growing French 
village at, 60 ; Genet's plans 
against, 298. 

Newport. D'Estaing sails against, 
204 ; Roehambeau hinds at, 206. 

New Providence, in the Bahamas, 



headquarters of colonial pirates, 
22. 

New York, establishment of colo- 
ny of, 17; early preponderance 
of the Dutch in, 18 ; a rival of 
the French in the fur trade, 24 ; 
Assembly of, questions English 
claim to the Ohio, 70; Indepen- 
dent Company from, fails to 
join Washington against the 
French, 76 ; Independent Com- 
panies from, under Innes at 
Will's Creek, 78; astir in the 
French war, 84 ; Independent 
Companies from, with Brad- 
dock, 85 ; legislative powers of 
Colonial Assembly of, suspend- 
ed, 139 ; majority in, opposed 
to revolution, 163 ; opposes mo- 
tion for declaration of inde- 
pendence, 187 ; delegates from, 
to Annapolis conference, 254; 
struggle in, over Constitution, 
260/ 

New York City, cosmopolitan 
character of colonial, 19 ; a cen- 
tre for pirates, 21 ; delegates of 
colonies assemble in, 134; Wash- 
ington's plans for defence of, 
186; British arrive before, 188; 
withdrawal of Washington from, 
190 ; Clinton retreats'" to, 203 ; 
D'Estaing's fleet appears off. 
203 ; Washington's welcome in, 
as President, 268 ; Washing- 
ton takes oath of office in, 
269. 

Niagara, a French post at, 61 ; 
Governor Shirley to lead attack 
upon, 84; failure of Shirley's 
expedition against, 90. 

Nicholas, Robert Carter, member 
of House of Burgesses, referred 
to in connection with debate 
of Stamp Act, 131 ; opposes 
Henry in convention, 170. 

Nicola, Colonel Lewis, proposal 
of, to make Washington king, 
219-220. 

Norfolk, Virgiuia, burned by Dun- 
more. 187. 

North, Lord, Prime-Minister, re- 
peals taxes, 144. 



326 



INDEX 



North Carolina, establishment of, 
18 ; characterization of, by Colo- 
nel By id, 34, 38 ; sends militia- 
men to assist Washington against 
the French, 76 ; prevented by 
governor from sending dele- 
gates to "congress" in New 
York, 134; riots iu, 145; delegates 
of, authorized to join in declara- 
tion of independence, 187 ; up- 
rising of, 208; refusal of, to yield 
western land claims. 246 ; fails to 
send delegates to Annapolis con- 
ference, 254. 

"Northern Neck" of Virginia, 
settlement of, 15-16 ; division 
of, into counties, 16 ; a natural 
seat of commerce, 16; immigra- 
tion of the Washingtons into, 
16; intimate intercourse of, with 
England, 30 ; of a piece with the 
rest of Virginia, 39 ; property of 
Augustine'Washington in, 45 ; 
estates of Lord Fairfax in, 49. 

Ohio, determination of Duquesne 
to occupy upper waters of, 60- 
61 ; first movement, of the French 
towards the, 62; Dinwiddie de- 
termines to send militia to the, 
69; Washington's journal to the, 
printed, 70 ; fort begun at the 
forks of the, by the English, 71; 
the fort seized by the French, 
71; French build Fort Duquesne 
on the, 73. 

Ohio Company, formation of, 61 ; 
establishment of posts by, in the 
west, 62; Governor Dinwiddie 
member of, 62, 64 ; Thomas Lee, 
president of the, 64 ; Lawrence 
Washington president of the, 
64 ; interested in Virginia route 
to Duquesne, 85 ; plans of, for 
opening the upper Potomac, 
246. 

Orme, Captain, invites Washing- 
ton to Braddoek's staff, 83. 

Oswego, English military post at, 
61 ; westward expedition of the 
French observed from, 62; taken 
by the French, 90. 

Otis, James, Advocate-General in 



Court of Admiralty, warns min- 
isters against enforcing search- 
warrauts, 123 ; criticised for 
boldness, 163. 

Paine, Robert Treat, represents 
Massachusetts in Congress at 
Philadelphia, 154. 

Pail lament renounces right to tax 
colonies, 201. 

Pendleton, Edmund, member of 
House of Burgesses, referred to 
iu connection with debate of 
Stamp Act, 131; character of, 
131 ; referred to, 135 ; chosen 
delegate to Congress at Phila- 
delphia, 148-149 ; vote received 
by, as delegate to Congress, 161; 
opposes Henry in convention, 
170 ; referred to, 172 ; president 
of Committee of Safety, 187 ; 
becomes judge, 234. 

Penn, Thomas, comment of, on 
Washington's resignation from 
militia, 80. 

Pennsylvania, establishment of 
colony of, 17 ; mixed population 
of, 18 ; immigration of Scots- 
Irish into, 19 ; westward move- 
ment of settlers from, 60-61 ; 
Assembly of, refuses to act 
against the French, 63 ; Assem- 
bly of, doubts English claim to 
the Ohio, 70 ; votes money to 
be used against the French, 76; 
advantages of route through, to 
Duquesne, 85 ; majority in, op- 
posed to revolution, 163 ; dele- 
gation from, led by Joseph 
Galloway, 164; delegates from, 
to Annapolis conference, 254 ; 
Whiskey Rebellion in, 303. 

Philadelphia, creation of, 17; cos- 
mopolitan character of colonial, 
19 ; Congress at, 149. 171 ; en- 
tered by Howe, 197 ; British 
leave, 202. 

Phillipse, Mary, interests Wash- 
ington, 93, 101, 174. 

Pinckney, Thomas, treaty of, with 
Spain, 306. 

Piracy in the colonies, 21-22 ; sup- 
pression of, 22. 



INDEX 



327 



Pitt, William, becomes Prime- 
Minister and ends the French 
war, 93 ff. 

Planters, in colonial Virginia, 
mode of life of, 6, 28-29; pro- 
portion of, in colonial Virginia, 
7 ; social position of, 8-9. 

Poles volunteer for service in 
America, 200. 

Potomac, Washington surveying 
ou the, 55; importance of, to 
commerce, 246 ; Washington's 
plans concerning, 246; confer- 
ence of commissioners concern- 
ing, at Mount Vernon, 252. 

Potomac Company, Washington 
chosen president of, 251. 

Presque Isle, French establish 
themselves at, 62. 

Princeton, Washington retreats to, 
191 ; battle of, 193. 

Principio Iron Company, interest 
of Augustine Washington in, 
45 ; Colonel Byrd on the man- 
agement of, 45. 

Privateering in the colonies, 21. 

Puritan Commonwealth in Eng- 
land the government of a mi- 
nority, 10. 

Puritans, unlike other English- 
men, 9 ; of the minority in Eng- 
land, 10; ascendency of, in New 
England, 10. 

Quakers of Pennsylvania op- 
pose war with French, 63. 

Quebec, Wolfe takes command of 
expedition against, 93 ; taken, 
95 ; attempt of Arnold to capt- 
ure, 183. 

Rahl, Colonel, mortally wound- 
ed, 192. 

Randolph, Edmund, becomes 
prominent, 235 ; appointed dele- 
gate to conference at Philadel- 
phia, 257 ; part of, in the con- 
ference, 259 : appointed Attor- 
ney-General, 278 ; Washington's 
reasons for choice of, 280 ; op- 
position of, to National Bank, 
293. 

Randolph, Peyton, member of 



House of Burgesses, referred to 
in connection with debate of 
Stamp Act, 131 ; previous life of, 
132; referred to, 135; chosen dele- 
gate to Congress at Philadelphia, 
148-149 ; chosen president of 
Congress at Philadelphia, 159 ;• 
votes received by, as delegate to 
Congress, 160 ; referred to, 172 ; 
death of, 234. 

Rangers, Virginian, added to Brad- 
dock's forces, 82 ; behavior of, 
in Braddock's defeat, 87, 88, 89; 
Braddock praises, 89. 

"Red Sea trade," the, 21-22. 

Redstone Creek, Ohio Company 
establishes post on. 62. 

Reed, Joseph, comment of, on 
Virginia delegates, 172. 

Restoration, effect of, upon colonial 
settlement, 17. 

Revolution, first battle of, 170; 
goes against British, 203 ; goes 
against Americans, 205 ; favors 
Americans in the South, 208 ; 
close of, 209 ; effect of, on Wash- 
ington, 216. 

Rhode Island, Puritan though 
various, 11 ; fails to send dele- 
gates to Annapolis conference, 
254 ; in sympathy with Shays, 
256. 

Richmond, Virginia convention 
meets in, 169. 

Robin, Abbe. 215, 221. 

Robinson, Beverly, entertains 
Washington in New York, 93. 

Robinson, Speaker of House and 
Treasurer of Virginia, thanks 
Washington for services, 103 ; 
death of, referred to, 113. 

Rochambe;iu, Count, lands men 
at Newport, 206 ; assists Wash- 
ington's plans, 208, 228. 

Rockingham, Lord, referred to, 
135; "declaratory act" under 
ministry of, 138. 

Rutledge, Edward, supports prop- 
osition of Galloway in Con- 
gress, 164; Washington's appeal 
to, 272. 

Rutledge, John, appointed to Su- 
preme Court, 281. 



32! 



INDEX 



St. Clair, Sir John, Washington 
at Williamsburg by order of, 
100. 

St. Lawrence, power of the French 
on the, 23. 

St. Leger, General, plans of, 194 ; 
failure of, 195. 

Sau Lazaro, Fort, storming of, 48. 

Saratoga, battle of, 195. 

Savannah taken by British, 204 

Schuyler, General, driven from 
Tieonderoga, 195 ; mentioned, 
198. 

Scots- Irish, in Virginia and the 
middle colonies, 19; settlement 
of, in Shenandoah Valley, 61; 
harassed by Indians on Virgini- 
an frontier, 91. 

Search- warrants issued by Board 
of Trade, 122. 

Servants, hired, in colonial Vir- 
ginia, 7. 

Settlers harassed by Indians on 
Virginian frontier, 91-92. 

Sharpe, Horatio, Governor of Ma- 
ryland, consults with Braddock 
at Alexandria, 83. 

Shays leads rebellion in Massa- 
chusetts, 256. 

Shenandoah, Washington survey- 
ing on the, 55 ; first movement 
of settlers into valley of, 61. 

Shippen, Dr., interview of, with 
Massachusetts delegates, 161- 
162. 

Shirley, William, Governor of 
Massachusetts, consults with 
Braddock at Alexandria, 83; to 
lead attack on Niagara, 84 ; fails 
in attack, 90; Washington's 
visit to, in 1756, 92, 93, 174. 

Slaves, proportion of, in colonial 
Virginia, 7. 

Smuggling, in the colonies, 21 ; 
common practice of, 121. 

Society of the Cincinnati, Wash- 
ington declines to meet, 257. 

"Sons of Liberty," 175. 

South Carolina, establishment of, 
18 ; Independent Company 
from, at Great Meadows, 73 ; 
provincials from, under Innes at 
Will's Creek, 78 ; majority in, 



opposed to revolution, 163; in 
power of British, 205 ; fails to 
send delegates to Annapolis 
conference, 254. 

Spain, alliance o., with France and 
America, 204; invasion of Eng- 
land attempted by. 204 ; closes 
Mississippi River to commerce, 
245, 247, 249; treaty with, ob- 
tained by Pinckney, 306. 

Spectator, the, Lord Fairfax a con- 
tributor to, 49-50; Washington's 
acquaintance with, 56. 

Spotswood, Alexander, character 
of, and career in Virginia, 37- 
38 ; judgment of Virginians by, 
38 ; on the education of Bur- 
gesses, 38 ; referred to, 119. 

Stamp Act, proposed by Grenville, 
123 ; passage of, 124 ; protest 
against, by House of Burgesses, 
124 ; Henry's leadership in de- 
bate of, 128-129 ; repeal of, 135. 

Steuben, Baron von, joins Wash- 
ington at Valley Forge, 200 ; 
harasses Cornwallis in North 
Carolina, 208. 

Stith, Rev. William, character and 
writings of, 35-36. 

Sullivan, General, 192. 

Swedes on the Delaware, 18. 

Taxation, Virginian Burgesses 
regard Dinwiddie's land fee as, 
69 ; of colonies, best imposed by 
Parliament, 118 ; imposed on 
wines and sugars, 1764, 119 ; di- 
rect, of colonies, favored by 
George Grenville, 119; disregard 
of, by officials and traders, 120 : 
ministry willing to remit. 167. 

Thomson, Charles, clerk of Con- 
gress, notifies Washington of 
his election, 265. 

Tieonderoga, Allen takes posses- 
sion of, 171; captured by Bur- 
goyne, 195. 

Tow'nshend, Charles, referred to, 
139. 

Trade, Ohio Company and the 
western, 61-62 ; Acts of, 121. 

Trenton captured by Washington, 
192. 



INDEX 



329 



Trumbull, Governor, referred to, 
189. 

Trumbull, Jonathan, Jr., Wash- 
ington's letter to, 244. 

Truro, parish of. represented by 
Augustine Washington, 46. 

Trvon, Governor of North Caro- 
lina, 145. 

Valiant, Washington's horse, 
mentioned, 110. 

Valley Forge, Washington Avin- 
ters at, 197, 199; Mrs. Washing- 
ton's visit to, 199. 

Vanbraam, Jacob, fencing-master 
at Mount Vernon, goes with 
Washington to warn the French, 
64. 

Veroennes, intercession of, in be- 
half of Captain Asgill, 225. 

Vermont, rebellion in, 256. 

Vernon, Admiral, at Cartagena, 
47-48. 

Villiers, Coulon de, attacks Wash- 
ington at Great Meadows, 74-75. 

Virginia, general English charac- 
ter of colonial, 5; fixed nature 
of society in, 5-6 ; lack of towns 
in, 6 ; independent plantation 
life in, 6-7, 28-29; classes of 
population in, 7; proportion of 
slaves in, 7 ; democratic spirit 
in, 8; position of Church in, 8 ; 
position of Established Church 
in, 8; contrasted with New Eng- 
land, 9; temper of, at establish- 
ment of the Commonwealth, 13; 
change in population of, during 
Commonwealth, 13-14; emigra- 
tion of John and Lawrence 
Washington to, 14 ; French Hu- 
guenots and Germans in, 18 : 
meets the French in western fur 
trade, 24; character and habits 
of society in, 28 ff . ; individu- 
ality of men in, 28-29 ; educa- 
tion and study in, 29-30; char- 
acter of literary work in, 30-31; 
travel in, 38; culture mixed with 
rough life in, 39; obliged to »ot 
alone against the French, 63 ; 
English regiments for French 
war arrive in, 81; route through, 



to Duquesne chosen by Brad- 
dock, 85 ; forces of, witli Brad- 
dock, 85; resents direct taxation, 
119; loyalty of colonists to, 130; 
prevented by governor from 
sending delegates to "congiess" 
in New York. 134; passes I ill of 
rights, 134; leadership of dele- 
gates from, in Congress at Phil- 
adelphia, 158-159 ; colonists of, 
armed, 168 ; convention of, meets 
at Richmond, 169 ; changes in, 
during the war, 234; yields west- 
ern laud claims, 246; commis- 
sioners from, meet at Mount 
Vernon concerning the Potomac, 
252; calls general conference at 
Annapolis, 254; delegates from, 
to Annapolis conference, 254; 
final adoption of national Con- 
stitution by, 260-261. 

Walpole, Horace, calls Washing- 
ton a " brave braggart," 78, 80, 
206. 

Walpole, Sir Robert, answer of, 
to Keith, 118. 

Washington, Augustine, father of 
George, 40 ; character and occu- 
pations of, 45-46 ; a represent- 
ative in the House of Burgesses, 
46; death and will of, 46; court- 
ship and marriage of, 47. 

Washington, Augustine (half- 
brother of George), estate and 
education of, 46 ; George with, 
at Bridges' Creek, 51; member 
of Ohio C mipany, 61. 

Washington, Georire, breeding of, 
epitomized. 3; birth of, 40; birth- 
place of, 41; age of, at his fa- 
ther's death, 46 ; interest of, iu 
his father's estate, 46; under bis 
mother's care, 47 ; as a boy at 
Mount Vernon and Belvoir, 50- 
51, 52-53, 56; comradeships of, 
as a boy, at Belvoir and Mount 
Vernon, 50-53, 56 ; keptatschool 
till sixteen. 51 ; at Bridges' Creek 
with his brother Augustine, 51; 
kept from going to sea, 51; l)oy- 
ish relish of, for practical effi- 
ciency, 51-52; quits school, 52; 



330 



INDEX 



intimacy of, with Lord Fairfax, 
53-56; surveyor for Lord Fair- 
fax. 53-56; letter of, on sur- 
veying experiences, 55 ; boy- 
ish reading of, 56 ; official ap- 
pointment of, as surveyor, 56; 
studies tactics and the broad- 
sword at Mount Vernon, 56; be- 
comes known throughout the 
Northern Neck, 57; goes to the 
Bahamas with Lawrence, 57; 
made Lawrence's executor, 57- 
58 ; contracts the small-pox in 
the Bahamas, 58 ; takes Law- 
rence's place in the militia, 58; 
put in charge of a military dis- 
trict, 58; contingent interest in 
Mount Vernon, 58; sent by Din- 
widdie to warn the Fivnch from 
the Ohio, 64-66; difficulties of 
the journe}', 65-66 ; endeavors 
to attach Indians to the English, 
66; appointed by Dinwiddie to 
command militia sent to the 
Ohio. 69; journal of, to the Ohio 
printed, 70; recruiting at Alex- 
andria, 71 ; commissioned lieu- 
tenant-colonel under Joshua 
Fry, 72 ; sent forward to cut a 
road to the Ohio, 72; establishes 
camp at Great Meadows, 73; 
trouble of, with Independent 
Company at Great Meadows, 73 ; 
succeeds Colonel Fry in com- 
mand, 73; spills first blood of the 
French war, 73-74; attacked 
by Villiers at Great Meadows, 
74-75; capitulates and retreats, 
76; thanked by the House of 
Burgesses, 77; letters of, on man- 
agement of expedition to Ohio, 
77 ; likes the sound of bullets, 
77 ; laughed at by Horace Wal- 
pole, 78 ; rejoins regiment at 
Alexandria, 78 ; resigns com- 
mand, 79 ; Thomas Penn's com- 
ment upon resignation of, 80 ; 
visits Braddock's regiment at 
Alexandria, 82; accepts place on 
Braddock's staff, 83 ; disputes 
of, with Braddock during ad- 
vance on Duquesne, 86; advises 
division of Braddock's force, 



86; in Braddock's defeat, 87-89 ; 
ill just before the battle, 88; di- 
rects retreat alone, 89; distressof, 
at sufferings of frontier settlers. 
91 ; thanked by the Burgesses for 
his services under Braddock, 91; 
keeps the frontier against the 
Indians, 91 - 92; cheered by 
Colonel Fairfax, 92 ; behavior 
of, towards his comrades, 92 ; 
hangs insubordinates, 92 ; visits 
Governor Shirley on matter of 
rank, 92-93; becomes interested 
in Mary Phillipse in New York, 
93 ; goes with Forbes against Fort 
Duquesne, 94; in ill-health, 94; 
George Mason to, on need of 
preserving himself for the coun- 
try, 94-95; meets Martha Cus- 
tis, 99; becomes engaged to Mrs. 
Custis, 101; early love affairs of, 
101 ; marriage of, 102 ; stay of, 
at the White House, 102; takes 
wife to Williamsburg, 102; 
chosen member of House of Bur- 
gesses, 103 ; embarrassed on en- 
tering House of Burgesses, 103; 
publicly thanked for services, 
103; management of estates by, 
104; home life of, 104-112, 251; 
business ability of, 105-106; at- 
titude of, towards drinking, 10S— 

109 ; election expenses of, 109; 
fondness of, for hunting, 109- 

110 ; getting estates into condi- 
tion, 110; pleasure outings of, 
111; taste of, in clothes, 111 ; de- 
sire of, to go to England, 112; 
comparison of, with Henry, 127; 
attitude of, towards debate on 
Stamp Act, 133; views of, on 
enforcement of Stamp Act, 134 ; 
confers with Mason on state of 
colonies, 135; relations of, with 
Fauquier, 136; letter of, to Ma- 
son on actions of Parliament, 
140 ; presents Mason's resolution 
to House of Burgesses, 140-141; 
encourages observance of impor- 
tation resolution, 142; buys new 
" chariot," 142; pre-empts lands 
in the west. 142; employments 
of, 142-143; gives ball at Alex- 



INDEX 



331 



andria, 143; attends horse-races 
in Philadelphia, 143 ; secures 
western land for comrades in 
French war, 143 - 144 ; places 
"Jackie" Custis in King's Col- 
lege, New York, 147; letter to 
Colonel Bassett, 147 ; chosen 
delegate to Congress at Phila- 
delphia, 148-149; not a leader 
in Congress at Philadelphia, 
159-160'; criticism of, of Gage's 
conduct, 160; reported saying 
of, 160; votes received by, as 
delegate to Congress, 161; in- 
terview of. with Massachusetts 
delegates, 161-162; foresees out- 
come of Congress's actions, 165- 
166; business affairs of, 166-167, 
assumes command of Virginia 
companies, 169; attends second 
Continental Congress, 171 ; ac- 
cepts command of army at Bos- 
ton, 174, 214; reverence of peo- 
ple for, 174; reaches Cambridge, 
180; assumes command of army, 
180 ; correspondence of, from 
headquarters, 181 ; privateers 
equipped by orders of, 182; oc- 
cupies Dorchester Heights, 184; 
enters Boston, 185 ; transfers de- 
fence to New York, 186 ; favors 
motion for declaration of inde- 
pendence, 188; evacuates Brook- 
lyn Heights, 190 ; withdrawal of, 
from New York City, 190; re- 
treat of, through New Jerse} 7 , 
191; crosses the Delaware, 191; 
forces recruited by, 192 ; capt- 
ures Trenton, 192; defeats Brit- 
ish at Princeton, 193 ; with- 
draws to Morristown, 193; proc- 
lamation of, 193 ; fortune of, 
pledged for payment of troops, 
194; causes Howe to retreat to 
New York, 196; defeat of, at the 
Brandy wine, 196; attacks Howe 
at Germantown, 197; winters at 
Valley Forge, 197; plots against, 

198 ; trials of, at Valley Forge, 

199 ; joined by Steuben, 200 ; 
attacks Clinton at Monmouth 
Court House, 202 ; wrath of, at 
Lee's cowardice, 202 ; grief of, 



at Arnold's treason, 207 ; takes 
Cornwallis at Yorktown, 209 ; 
courage of, 215 ; effect of the 
war on, 216; reserve of, in dis- 
charge of duty, 218 ; advises 
with Congress, 219; rejoins army 
at Newburgh, 219; indignation 
of, at Colonel Nicola's proposal, 
220 ; efforts of, in behalf of the 
army, 221; loses popularity with 
the army, 222 ; treatment of mu- 
tinous officers by, 222-223; long- 
ing of, for home, 223; sternness 
of, 224; reply of, to Vergennes 
concerning Captain Asgill, 225; 
gratification of, at release of 
Captain Asgill, 225; farewell of, 
to officers, 226 ; speech of, on re- 
signing commission at Annap- 
olis, 226-227; prayer of, before 
battle, 227 ; returns to Mount 
Vernon, 228 ; simplicity of, 228 ; 
attends ball with his mother, 
228 ; deference of, to his mother, 
229 ; rebukes his nephew, 233 ; 
welcome of, on return to Vir- 
ginia, 235; privacy of, at Mount 
Vernon, 237; letter of, to La- 
fayette, 237; interruptions of, at 
Mount Vernon, 238 ; as a host, 
238 ; affection of, for adopted 
children, 239; agreement of, with 
gardener, 240; strictness of, in 
business dealings, 241 ; eagerness 
of people to see, 241 ; makes 
journey to western lands, 242 ; 
cares of, as statesman, 243 ; anx- 
iety of, for success of govern- 
ment, 243-244; ' ' political creed " 
of, 244 ; forebodings of, for fut- 
ure of the West, 245; efforts of, 
to open the Potomac, 246; urges 
increase of Congress's power, 
248 ; portraits of, 250 ; makes 
tour of inspection as president 
of Potomac Company, 251 ; in- 
vites commissioners on opening 
of the Potomac to Mount Ver- 
non, 252 ; letter of, to Henry Lee, 
254 ; criticises weakness of Con- 
gress, 256; appointed delegate 
to Philadelphia conference, 257; 
reluctance of, to attend confer- 



332 



INDEX 



ence at Philadelphia, 257 ; op- 
poses com promise in conference 
at Philadelphia, 258 ; chosen 
president of conference, 258; re- 
turns lo Mount Vernon, 259; in- 
tense interest of, in discussions 
of Constitution, 259; congratu- 
lations of, to Chastellux on mar- 
riage, 260 ; reluctance of, to ac- 
cept presidency, 261 ; accepts 
presidency, 262; bids farewell 
t»» his mother, 265; leaves Mount 
Vernon, 265; feelings of, on leav- 
ing home, 266; financial troubles 
of, 267; journey of, to New York, 
267; present journey contrasted 
with former ones, 267: welcome 
of, in New York, 268; takes oath 
of office, 269; emotion of, during 
inaugural address, 270-271; in- 
experience of, in administration, 
272-273; fitness of, for office, 
273 ; dignity of, in office, 274- 
276 ; illness of, 277; familiarity 
of, with affairs of government, 
278; choice of cabinet by, 278; 
care of, in federal appointments, 
281 ; makes tour of eastern states, 
281 - 282 ; sympathy of, with 
Hamilton's policy, 284; attitude 
of, towards French Revolution, 
290-291, 292, 296; object in na- 
tional policy of, 291 ; sanctions 
National Bank, 294 ; frontier 
policy of, 295 ; neutrality of, be- 
tween Fiance and England, 297; 
frustrates plans of Genet, 298 ; 
demands recall of Genet, 300 ; 
elected to second term, 301; sends 
John Jay to England, 302; puts 
down Whiskey Rebellion, 303 ; 
favors Jay's treaty with Eng- 
land. 305; abuse of, by the peo- 
ple, 305; behavior of, under abuse, 
306; wisdom of, recognized, 306; 
attempts reconciliation of Ham- 
ilton and Jefferson, 307; declines 
third term. 308; farewell address 
of, 308; emotion of. on retire- 
ment from office, 309; retires to 
Mount Vernon, 309-310; connec- 
tions of, with public life, 310; 
treatment of old comrade by, 



311 ; gentleness of, with chil 
dren, 312; attends marriage of 
Nellie Custis, 312; sickness and 
death of, 313-314 

Washington, Colonel Henry, holds 
Worcester for the king, 14, 48- 
49. 

Washington, John, emigration of, 
to Virginia, 14-15; ancestry of, 
14-15 ; settlement. of, in "North- 
ern Neck" of Virginia, 16-17 ; 
life of, in Virginia, 40; fortunes 
of descendants of, 40. 

Washington, Rev. Lawrence, rec- 
tor of Purleigh, 15, 41. 

Washington, Lawrence, emigrant 
to Virginia, 14-15 ; ancestry of, 
14-15; settlement of, in " North- 
ern Neek " of Virginia, 16-17. 

Washington, Lawrence (half-broth- 
er of George), estate and educa- 
tion of, 46 ; service of, at Carta- 
gena, 47 ; in the storming of 
Fort San Lazaro, 48 ; head of 
the family and adjutant - gen- 
eral of the colonial militia, 48 ; 
marriage of, 48-49 ; member of 
the House of Burgesses, 50; in- 
fluence of, upon George, 50-53, 
57; illness and death of, 57; 
makes George his executor and 
residuary legatee, 57-58 ; mem- 
ber of Ohio Company. 61; presi- 
dent of Ohio Company, 64 ; cor- 
respondence of, with Dinwiddie, 
64. 

Washington, Lund, 181 ; manage- 
ment of Mount Vernon by, 233. 

Washington. Martha, outings of, 
with Washington, 111 ; at Wash- 
ington's headquarters at Cam- 
bridge, 184; at Valley Forge, 190. 

Washington, Mary, courtship and 
marriage of, 47 ; keeps George 
from going to sea, 51 ; attends 
ball with Washington, 228; 
Washington's deference to, 229 ; 
Washington bids farewell to, 
265. 

W.ishingtons, the, fortunes of, in 
the Northern Neck, 39-40. 

Went worth, commander of land 
forces at Cartagena, 47. 



INDEX 



333 



West Point, Arnold tries to be- 
tray, 207. 

Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsyl- 
vania and Virginia, 303. 

Whitehall Ferry, Washington at, 
226. 

White House, Washington's stay 
at, 102. 

White Plains, skirmish at. 190. 

William and Mary, College of, 30; 
chiefly founded by James Blair, 
36. 

Williamsburg, Virginia's chief 
town, 6 ; Washington belated 
at, by courting, 100; Washing- 
ton and wife at, 102 ; Dunmore 
lands troops at. 171. 

Will's Creek, Ohio Company's 
post at, 62; Captain Innes builds 
Fort Cumberland at, 78. 



Wilson, James, appointed to Su- 
preme Court, 281. 

Winchester, Washington on busi- 
ness concerning General Forbes 
at, 100. 

Wolfe, General, takes command 
against Quebec, 93; takes Que- 
bec, 95. 

Worcester, Colonel Henry Wash- 
ington at, 14, 48-49. 

Wythe, George, referred to, in 
connection with debate of Stamp 
Act, 130 ; referred to, 135 ; ap- 
pointed delegate to Philadelphia 
conference, 257. 

Yorktown, Virginia, Cornwallis 
arrives at, 208; Cornwallis's sur- 
render at, 209. 

Young, Arthur, correspondence 
of, with Washington, 260. 



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